The Dangers of Equestrian Sport

Aside from football, equestrian sport is the only sport in the world where a human rides on top of an animal to compete at Olympic levels. While the skill it takes to ride a quiet, gentle horse at a walk is relatively easy to appreciate, it requires an enormous amount of training and experience to train a horse to perform at a Grand Prix in dressage, fly around a course of 1 m forty show jumps or cross country gallop as fast as possible on a difficult course of obstacles. The sport is extremely dangerous and the athletes, who are competing for medals over multiple rounds, are at risk of serious injury. Those injuries can happen when the horse and rider fall or when the horses run through obstacles that aren’t properly cleared. This week, the death of British eventer Georgina Campbell brought renewed attention to the dangers of equestrian sport and how much work it takes to keep the animals safe.

The FEI, the international governing body for equestrian sports, has made significant changes to the rules of competition and to safety equipment over the years. It has implemented innovations such as frangible pins in cross-country fences that collapse on impact to reduce the risk of horse falls. It also has strict veterinary controls, weight restrictions on riders and other changes to improve the welfare of the horses.

Still, the injuries — including some fatal ones — continue to occur. As a result, the FEI has been under pressure from animal advocates to do more to protect the lives of the athletes and their horses. This pressure has been augmented by a series of high profile incidents, including a bad public moment for equestrian athlete Rich Streck and the resurfacing of a decades old scandal surrounding the sport’s drug use.

Those incidents have led to people outside of the horse world weighing in on the sport, and not always with positive views. In fact, the incidents have made many in the equestrian industry wonder whether non-horse people really understand how hard it is for these athletes to successfully pilot the minds and bodies of expensive, high level horses.

The good news is that equestrian athletes are not claiming to be superhuman, and they know full well that horses do the majority of the physical work. It is the highly developed communication and partnership between the horse and rider that has them succeed. And that, plus years of training.