No one can say with any certainty how many of the Americans who ride horses consider themselves to be primarily event riders. The statistical radar screen of U.S. Eventing Association membership only pinpoints about 13,000, but it’s anybody’s guess how many thousands more ride in events that the USEA neither records nor recognizes.

The most usual estimate is that for every USEA competing member, there’s a competing non-member, so there are roughly 25,000 American eventers. Scientific it is not!

But we do know that the overwhelming majority of those riders are female.

And we know that about 70 percent of USEA members live in the eastern 1/5 of the country, 15 percent in the western 1/5, and 15 percent live in the huge middle 3/5. It’s still an East Coast-dominated sport.

National demographic trends have altered the patterns of horse ownership and participation for all of the riding and driving disciplines, not just eventing. The great “Catch-22” of riding is that since horse ownership is expensive, riders have to have good jobs. And the better jobs tend not to be way out in the country, where good riding land still exists. So increasingly event riders live in suburbs, commute into towns and cities to work, then commute out to boarding stables to ride.

Of the 17 riders who were at my farm during the busy stretch just before the Southern Pines Horse Trials (N.C.) in March, six normally boarded their horses at home, and 11 boarded at professional facilities. The average American eventer is, ever more increasingly, a “child of the suburbs.”

Event riders, by and large, would dearly love to take care of their own horses, on their own farms, but the tidal wave of American population growth and the attendant surge in real estate prices is killing that dream for most.

Most event riders are at least reasonably affluent, and they need to be. I was recently told of an analysis showing the cost to keep one horse for one day in the Northeast. It was $17 a day ($510/month), and that was just for hay, grain, bedding, and 1/365 of vet care, shoeing, insurance, and all the other “normal” expenses. The $17 a day didn’t include tack, lessons, truck, trailer, fuel, overnight lodging, entry fees or stabling.

Even at little, unrecognized one-day novice horse trials, the entry fee is likely to be anywhere from $65 to $90. Then we need to figure in some percentage of the annual cost of truck and trailer ownership, or we have to pay someone else to haul our horse. If we have to spend the night, add hotel, meals and stabling, and it’s pretty easy to spend $250 to $300 for even a small event.

I did an informal survey of the riders here at Tamarack, and most of them expect to contest between six and eight events in 2006, plus a few local jumper or dressage shows. That’s another $2,000 per year, and it still doesn’t include boots, breeches, tack, ma-nure forks, brooms, brushes, and ad infinitum.

If we take that $17 a day basic horse maintenance, rigorously pare it to $12 a day, ($4,380 per year), and add in competition expenses for six events at a rock bottom $200 per event ($1,200 per year), and add in all those other hidden costs, it’s pretty likely that one season of non-recognized eventing will cost about $7,500, bare minimum, for one horse and one rider. It goes up from there, way, way, way up, into six figures to support one upper-level rider with a string of elite horses.

American eventing can be viewed as a pyramidal structure, with a huge base of riders at the elementary, beginner novice, novice, and training levels (90%), a “semi-elite” group of preliminary level riders (7%), an elite group of intermediate level riders (3%), and a tiny, select “upper elite” of about 250 advanced competitors (fewer than 1%).

The two top levels comprise a tiny tip of the big pyramid, and they never really reach the radar screen for the enormous majority of those who event. This leaves the preliminary level as a sort of “bridge” between lower-level and top-level eventing, a quite difficult challenge, but not as inconceivable to imagine.

All the “questions” that can be asked by cross-country course designers at the two highest levels can be asked at the preliminary level. Although a 3’7″ oxer may not sound very big by show jumping standards, one made of solid logs, approached through deep mud, near the end of a two-mile gallop on a hot day is a worthy goal!

If preliminary is a bridge between the top levels and the lower levels, then what is the training level? I’ve always thought of it as solidly mid-level eventing. Since 13 percent of us ride at this level, it’s an attainable goal for motivated competitors.

Really, though, the levels where the huge majority of us live, slightly more than 75 percent of us, are the novice, beginner novice and elementary levels. It would be an enormous mistake, for dozens of reasons, to dismiss these lower levels as insignificant, unworthy or “easy.” For one thing, I’d remind the top 4 percent of our fellow riders that it’s the other 96 percent of us who create, administer, pay for, and support the sport that allows them to have their moment in the sun. If they drive a wedge between themselves and the rest of us, their little castle in the sky will rest on pretty shaky underpinnings.

Something else worth remembering is that what goes up eventually goes down! I last rode at Rolex Kentucky in 1996, a few months before I turned 55. I rode in my last advanced event at Groton House (Mass.) in 1999. Now I’m delighted to be riding at the preliminary level. And I hope someday to be still competing at beginner novice.

To me, anyone who events at any level is a hero. Theodore Roosevelt once spoke disparagingly about non-combatants, calling them “cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat.” There are no “cold and timid souls” who compete in events.

(Thanks to Jo Whitehouse and her USEA staff for their statistical assistance with this article.)