It’s a blessing and a curse that you can now watch every five-star event (and most CCI4*-L events) from anywhere in the world via livestream. It’s a tremendous learning experience for anyone who aspires to be a better cross-country rider, because you can watch how the best in the world do it. But it also puts every decision those top event riders make on display for the world to see, to critique and to judge. And guess what? They’re human, too, and they make mistakes.

The question is: How do we, as a sport, respond to those mistakes? Where are the opportunities for all of us—riders, coaches and officials—to learn from those mistakes? 

Above all, eventing needs to be about rider responsibility. It’s always on the rider to make the best horsemanship decision for their horse. I’ve been making that point since 2008. But riders obviously aren’t making the right decisions all the time. Not all riders make bad decisions. Not all good riders make good decisions every time.

We can learn a lot from the decisions riders made at the Defender Kentucky CCI5*-L, April 24-28. For example, Doug Payne made the decision to pull up Camarillo at the bottom of the hill between Fences 20 and 21. They were clear up until that point, but it was the gelding’s first five-star, he’s only 10, and he was tired. Doug can come back and fight another day.

I was at the event watching on the big screen when Zach Brandt was on course with Direct Advance. Six minutes in, I looked over at my wife Keli, and I said, “Well, Zach’s not getting home.” At eight minutes, it was obvious to me that he was in serious trouble, riding a very tired horse. He finished but was eliminated by the ground jury for riding an exhausted horse and given a yellow card.

And then there was Phillip Dutton, who looked great early in the course on Quasi Cool. He wasn’t shown on the live feed for a while, and when he came back on the screen toward the end of the course, he was going clear but running about a minute late, which indicated he took a hold of the horse and was trying to nurse it home. Unfortunately they fell at the last fence. 

In a Facebook post the next day, Phillip said: “We got to the last fence yesterday, and [Quasi Cool] was exhausted; unfortunately, in a bit of rider error, I asked him to leave a little long, so that was obviously disappointing, but I don’t think he’s much worse for wear today.”

I think Phillip made an honest mistake; Superman missed. He honestly thought he could nurse the horse one more fence, and it didn’t happen. The horse was eliminated because of the fall, but Phillip, who is extremely experienced and quite good at carrying a tired horse home without making it look obvious, didn’t get a yellow card or a written warning. 

Sometimes you decide to keep going because you think you’ve got enough horse, and the horse makes a mistake. Sometimes you pull up, and maybe the horse could have gotten home. Those are decisions that we have to allow riders to make. In my opinion, Phillip should have pulled up to make a statement that it’s OK to pull up. We love 99.9% of the stuff Phillip does; he’s amazing, he makes great saves, and that’s why he’s been to so many Olympics.

But when you make a mistake, it should be understood that we have a zero-tolerance policy on this, and I don’t care if it’s a seven-time Olympian like Phillip Dutton or someone much newer to the five-star level, like Zach Brandt. I don’t think Phillip wants to be given a bye; I’m guessing he’d say, “Yeah, that was pretty stupid.” 

The ground jury has to be brave enough to act in those situations, so the up-and-coming riders see it and think, “You know what? It’s not worth it to jump the last fence on a tired horse, because I’m going to get a yellow card.” Right now, it seems like whether you get that yellow card depends on how well you ride and whether you have the experience to (almost) nurse a horse home.

It’s not just about a particular horse in a particular moment. It’s about where the sport is going, and it’s about how we can demonstrate to our younger riders that it is OK to pull a horse up. The old school “go until they drop” mentality is unacceptable, and it never really was acceptable. The rules were different then; you could have multiple falls of a horse and rider before elimination. In this day and age, if you’re not sure you can get home, you should err on the side of caution and pull up. Be an ambassador for the sport; be willing to say, “Hey, today’s not our day.”

How do we make everybody a little bit more proactive instead of reactive? For the officials, that means not being afraid to step in. For the riders, that means not being afraid to pull up. For the coaches, that means not being afraid to say hard things to students, whether that’s, “You’re not ready to move up” or, “This horse can’t do that level.”

On the officiating side, the ground jury is under such pressure to make split-second decisions, and they can’t. They can’t move quickly enough; the list of boxes they need to check before they can pull a horse up on course is far too long to get it done the instant they recognize a problem.

I’m not an official. But as someone who cares about the sport, as someone who sees it from a horsemanship perspective, I think we need to allow these ground juries more leeway to make decisions and to make things happen. I want to give the ground jury more power and less worry about making those kinds of decisions. Because if the ground jury isn’t able to make those kinds of decisions quickly enough, then we need more tools. And those tools aren’t rules. The last thing we need is another rule. 

What I really, really want for is for us—the rest of the sport—to support the ground juries in those situations, and for the riders to take the emotion out of it. It’s not about attacking the ground jury, which is what I feel it has become; they’ve become the scapegoat. At the end of the day, it is 100% rider responsibility. But when a ground jury sees a rider not acting responsibly, they need to be able step in without having their hands tied. 

What we need to do is give the ground jury more freedom but also some accountability. We need checks and balances, so the ground jury isn’t just it. I want there to be a back-and-forth relationship between ground juries and what we might call juries of their peers within the sport. I want the ground juries to know that, as the chair of the U.S. Eventing Association Rider Safety Subcommittee, I’m always willing to listen. When the ground jury gives somebody a yellow card, and the rider disputes it, I would like to look at that and be able to say to the rider, “Nope, you were wrong.” Or vice versa, to be able to say to the ground jury, “Hey, you guys, this is a bit questionable.” Or in an instance where a rider didn’t get a yellow card when they should have, hold the ground jury accountable for not doing their job and standing up for the sport and for what they believe in.

Doug Payne is also a pilot, and he talks about the Federal Aviation Administration reports that are issued after investigations into plane crashes. They do the investigation, they come up with the findings, and they release the findings to everyone so that, hopefully, other people don’t make that same mistake. We need to not take this personally, and we need to do this in a way that is intended to better the sport, to make people be accountable and be held accountable. Rider responsibility is huge. Accountability is just as important, for everyone, on all sides.

Every other sport out there has video replay. If a referee on the field in an NFL game makes a questionable call, there’s someone in New York who reviews that call and can overturn it. We need to be able to have that kind of oversight, even retroactively, to hold the ground jury responsible for not doing something when they should have. It’s about accountability: “Why didn’t you do that?”

That’s the question, and if the answer is, “We just missed it,” well, why did you miss it? Do we need another person, similar to what was discussed at the FEI Eventing Seminar in January, who just sits in front of the video monitors, where their entire job is to keep on top of things, looking for signs of a problem, like seeing a horse add a stride or coming off the bridle. It would have to be an extremely knowledgable person who can spot those things and read those situations. That might be a long-term project, but we have to start somewhere.

We need to allow riders to make horsemanship decisions, because it really does come down to rider responsibility. But we also need to make sure that there are similar outcomes for similar offenses. At Kentucky, the ground jury’s mistake wasn’t the fact that they didn’t stop Zach on course, because Zach should have stopped himself. Their mistake was not yellow-carding Phillip, who is better at riding a tired horse, for the same offense.

Officials don’t like to hand out yellow cards; they’re not giving them away like candy, and they’re not taken lightly when they are handed out. I think that the officials are a bit hesitant to issue them sometimes, when in my opinion they should be a bit more stringent about applying them. We need the issue of rider responsibility to be taken more seriously because they’re in the public eye. Things like riding a tired horse or an exhausted horse should be taken more seriously, and the consequence of that should be greater. The accountability has to be taken into consideration a lot more in this modern era.

Danny Warrington, of North East, Maryland, is a former steeplechase rider turned international three-day event rider and trainer. In his racing years he worked with Hall of Fame trainers Jonathan Sheppard, Mikey Smithwick and Janet Elliot. In eventing he also sought out the best trainers, including Bruce Davidson, Karen O’Connor, Jimmy Wofford and Phillip Dutton. His passion for safety and personal responsibility led him to establishing his LandSafe Equestrian training, along with his wife, Keli Warrington, to save lives and reduce injuries from falls.