For years I’ve noticed that people believe a little myth that winning a World Championship or Olympic team gold medal in the three-day event should, somehow, be routine for our teams. Not exactly easy, maybe, but routine.

But it really isn’t routine, and I don’t think it ever will be. How hard is it to do what our three-day team just did at the World Equestrian Games? Well, let me see if I can give you an idea.

I rode in my first equestrian competition in April 1954, a gymkhana in Greenfield, Mass. That was 48 years ago. Dwight David Eisenhower was the president. World War II had ended just eight years earlier.

Since then, we’ve won four team gold medals. Four in 48 years. That’s two about every quarter of a century.

We last won the World Championships when I was on the team in September 1974. Richard Nixon had resigned as president one month earlier. Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champion of the world. The Dow Jones industrial average stood right around 600. David O’Connor was 12, John Williams was 9, Amy Tryon was 4, and Kim Severson-Vinoski was a newborn baby.

For about a decade, from 1974 to 1984, it did seem almost routine for our three-day riders to win gold medals. Our team struck gold at the 1974 World Championships, the 1976 Olympics, and the 1984 Olympics. Plus, Bruce Davidson was the World Champion in 1974 and 1978, Tad Coffin was the Olympic gold medalist in 1976, Mike Plumb won the individual silver in both 1974 and ’76, and Karen Stives won the individual silver in 1984.

Then the gold stopped’cold. We wouldn’t see any again for 16 years until David O’Connor’s individual Olympic win in 2000, and now we’ve won the team gold medal too.

We Americans are used to having our own way in the world. We’re the richest society on earth, and everything we do is the best and the biggest’at least according to us. Some of us find it hard to accept that little countries like New Zealand, Australia or England can have tiny fractions of our population and our wealth yet beat us, and beat us, and beat us.

They do it because they’re desperate to keep doing it. Right this moment you can absolutely count on the fact that planning committees from Germany, France, England, Australia, New Zealand, and all the less prominent eventing nations are doing precisely what we’re doing. They’re analyzing and evaluating what we did right and what they did wrong, what parts of their system they have to keep, what they have to fix, and what they have to scrap.

They’re not boring, but I sometimes feel as though I’ve been going to planning committee meetings of the U.S. Equestrian Team, the U.S. Eventing Association and USA Equestrian since the building of the pyramids. But that’s where we plot and plan how to beat everybody else, just as they plot and plan how to beat us.

We talk about coaching and training sessions, selection procedures, fund-raising, assistance grants, event scheduling, how to send more riders to compete in Europe, as well as how to improve and upgrade the events right here at home.

And that was part of the formula for creating the four-star CCI at Kentucky in 1998. We needed an event where our riders could get to the peak of experience in our own country. It worked. Kim Severson-Vinoski, John Williams and Amy Tryon each rode their first four-star events there. This past April at Kentucky, they placed first, second and third. And last month they won the gold medal.

Every one of the good eventing countries has an infrastructure of events similar to ours, one that feeds riders up through the system to a team situation at the top, which then trains and supports those few elite athletes.

How few is few? How hard is it to be on a championship team, to be one of the three riders whose scores count toward a gold medal? In America there are probably 30,000 event riders riding at some level today, although the gigantic majority of these are at the training, novice and beginner novice levels. The scores that counted at the WEG were Williams’ fourth place, Severson-Vinoski’s sixth place, and David O’Connor’s 10th place. That’s three out of 30,000, which means one of every 10,000 riders might contribute to a gold medal.

So my advice to our gold medalists is to savor the moment, and to let us savor it with you. We may be in for a dominant streak like the 1974-’84 decade, when we got collectively jaded with lesser colors like silver and bronze, but the statistics suggest otherwise.

After all, the last time we won the World Championships, Jack Le Goff was skinny (well, sort of), I had hair, Mike Plumb had sideburns longer than Elvis Presley’s, and Bruce Davidson’s and Don Sachey’s adult children were yet to be born. If we have to wait another 28 years, chances are that some of the riders who’ll do the job for us in 2030 are wearing diapers right now.