Wild horses

I think just about anyone who's spent any significant time around horses knows at least one person who's been seriously injured or killed. Broken backs, broken necks, fractured skulls--I knew one woman whose skittish horse reared up while they were on a very steep hill and fell over backwards on top of her, fracturing both legs in several places, one arm, rupturing her spleen, doing severe damage to her liver, and knocking her unconscious for an extended period of time--which was good, because it took a long time to medevac her. If you've ever seen a movie where a horse struggles up after a roll, you have a pretty good idea of what it might be like to be trapped under that back while a half a ton of writhing quarterhorse ground the saddle horn into your belly. I was there a year later when she climbed back atop that same horse, and it may be the bravest thing I've ever witnessed.

Periodically, this leads to complaints about the safety of the various sports. This seems to happen when rising incomes bring a lot of new people into the sport, and they (or their parents) belatedly discover that yes, large animals are extremely dangerous, especially if you perch atop them while they leap a six-foot hurdle.

Apparently, three day eventing--sort of the Iron Man triathlon of the equestrian world--is now in one of its periodic self-examinations. The article isn't very detailed--though it does have a lovely, stomach-churning graphic of what happens when your horse takes a fence badly wrong--but it seems that as usual, the fight pits beginners and casual hobbyists against the elite competitors.

It's hard to know who to side with. Elite riders are usually better heeled than the amateurs, and like other star athletes are often unbelievably arrogant . . . well, I won't use that word on a family blog. This makes their "let them eat cake" attitude towards the folks who end up in wheelchairs or coffins a tad grating. And it's frankly ludicrous to hear people say that in a sport where the basic equipment starts in the tens of thousands of dollars and marches rapidly north into the millions, they can't afford some $100 pins to make the fences a bit safer.

On the other hand, my impression is that most of the elite riders, like other star athletes, really are willing to take a substantial risk of death or paralysis in order to achieve excellence. Part of their seeming arrogance is, I think, a failure to emotionally comprehend why everyone else doesn't feel the same way. And I understand why they resent having their performance held back to the standards of weekend hobbyists.