Olympic Showjumping - why is the team so old????

[cherryminx]

Am I the only person to think it is a bit odd that our Olympic showjumping team is composed mainly of people who were around when I was a teenager? (I am old - almost as old as most of the people in the team).

Surely there are some new young show jumping talents out there? Is some kind of show jumping cartel that means you can only be in the team if you are married into a show jumping royal family as in a Jilly Cooper book?

Plus they didn't even get a team medal.

Charlotte Dujardin comes from a very ordinary background. Neither rich nor posh. Valegro was bought as an unridden 2yo for a few thousand EUR.

Yabu. The woman opposite me at the yard is 70, rides daily. Dujardin, for example, was very lucky to be on Hester's yard. There re younger riders up and coming, but hey, why shouldn't a bloke like Nick Skelton carry on doing what he's bloody good at?

Well, you're sort of right in the sense of having young up and coming riders coming through. The British eventing team is currently going through this phase where they are trying to get their less experienced riders experience at championship level. They went for years undefeated in the euros in the team competition and usually managed a medal at Olympic level. They were all aiming for London. Ever since London, they have been working on getting more experience for their younger riders - kitty king and Gemma tattersall among those. They sent a bunch of younger riders to Blair castle euros last year which was a great experience for them. William was unlucky, pippas horse just wasn't ready (he's only been eventing a few years and her other good horses are injured currently), the other two combinations both horses were not experienced enough. It's also about having good horses at the right level at the right time. Hopefully woodlander farouche will stay uninjured in years to come and be able to represent us in the dressage. The riders are there but at some point there has to be a transition phase where the team won't do as well because some members are still gaining experience. I know more about the dressage and eventing scenes but it's pretty cyclical in general and I'm sure it is the same for showjumping. It's been a long long time since team gb won individual gold in the showjumping so all power to them.

I'm quite cross about this thread. I think it is pretty dispiriting to see our young medal winners and realise that their international careers are likely to be over before they are 35. It is fantastic to have a sport where age is not a barrier.

Its complicated, is the answer.

Money, experience, risk..

The 'old guys' have got money, they can afford to have a big stable full of young, intermediate and more experienced horses to bring on, and the required staff, including working pupils and stable riders to be out educating those horses in the lower level competitions and bringing them on under their expert eye.

Those horses on the whole do not belong to them - some do, most in part ownership and many wholly owned by someone (or someoneS else)...

Owners put their horses where they are most likely to do well, learn well, compete well, raise their value as broodmares, stallions, or to raise the value of their parents - a stallion and broodmare are rated by the performance of their offspring after all.

So does an owner take a risk on a young rider who only has a handful of horses and can only get to a few competitions, only has perhaps a couple of staff and riders, so if theres an accident, those horses won't be competing but will be standing in stables and fields doing nothing for months?

Or do you send your valuable potential superstar to a big name where even IF the worst happens and two of their stable riders break a limb next week, that horse is STILL going to get out there and compete and get a competition record...

The horse world (and this is the reason I got the hell out after a year at equine college) still lives in the dark ages when it comes to employing grooms, exercise riders, working pupils etc. They are paid a pittance, they are worked INCREDIBLY hard on the basis that they 'do it because they love horses', and thats one reason we have fewer young riders coming up - we still do have a lot of good un's.. but less kids are willing to put themselves through that for the slim chance that they will be the next Charlotte or the next Scott or the next Ben... and the very VERY high chance that they will spend the next 40 years shovelling shit and riding loopers that want to kill you. And then when you are too old and crippled to do it any more, turns out you are too old and knackered and have no transferrable skills to do anything else!

The fact the old guys are STILL at it is a great thing though - they are out there, still winning medals and that means equestrian sports will still get funding from the lottery and govt, and from sponsors and owners - theres still motivation to own good horses, to put them with british riders rather than sell them overseas or give the ride to foreign riders.

Ha, I'm sorry, but I do have to giggle a little. A year at equine college is nothing. I spent years working as a top level groom in more than one discipline (did London, boss was top ten).

And the reason why most grooms are paid a pittance is because most riders cannot afford to pay proper wages. Especially in eventing. However, most do provide accommodation, and are generous with food, taking you to the pub, etc. They realise that they cannot do what they do without their team. Although yes, like anywhere, you do get the occasional entitled dick.
Most riders have to buy young horses to produce and sell on for a profit to make some money, unless you are lucky enough to have an owner who can afford to run 2/3 horses, because finding owners is hard. Especially since the recession started. These horses are always run "on the cheap" to minimise running costs and maximise profit.

We don't have fewer up and coming riders. We have more than we have ever had, the reason why most don't make it is because they either realise it's more hard work than they thought, and they aren't prepared to do it or because they just aren't good enough. I've lost count of the number of (mostly) girls who rock up, thinking it's all going to be fun and games and they'll be socialising with the top people, and the cold hard reality of having to get up and ride 6,7,8 horses a day hits. They don't realise that to get to a competition it can be a 2am start and a 10pm finish. And they're not prepared to put the hard work in to make it happen. My old boss actually put a ban on anyone who had been to equine college (and I know they weren't the only one) unless they had several years of experience after and came with a damn good reference. Because as one put it "they come in thinking they know everything and it's all going to be a college experience, and soon realise they can't hack it".

Oh, and if a rider has an accident, then their owners decide if they want to turn the horse away or most go to another rider for the year. I know of several horses who've spent a year with a different rider because their usual one is injured or pregnant. Most owners are incredibly loyal to riders that work hard, and are honest and loyal to them.

Madging equine college graduations have a bit of a reputation in livery yards and riding schools as well. They don't seem to realise that yards are generally doing well if they break even. I spent a year as a working pupil in the early 1990s. I got board, lodging and training in return for work. The riding school, like many others, is shut now because they can't get away with doing that any more and can't pay people £7.50 an hour given how labour intensive the job is.

I knew one young woman who gave up on the livery yard where I had my horse when she realised how much she was supposed to be responsible for. Turned out she'd left an eventing yard because they expected her to do evening stables once or twice a week. She just didn't get the fact that someone had to do a late check, because that's what horses need and that it wasn't magically going to be someone else taking the responsibility.

It annoys me that the general public often have this view of top riders as rich snobs who waft around on animals trained to do circus tricks. They don't realise how hard riders work, how skilled what they do is and how very few of the riders actually own the animals they ride.

But if you need loads of experience etc (which I agree you do) then why were these current riders around when the OP was a youngster? Surely there should have been other 'old' riders back then - not these same ones who would have been young ones. Was there a lack of talent back in OP's youth?

Agree about some college graduates. I did an equine college course but because we didn't have our own stables and our group was only about 16 students spread over the two year groups, we had a more realistic experience,. We each had 2/3 horses we were responsible for on the four days a week we were on the yard. I know that's not comparable to real life in a yard (when I was on a racing stud I could easily muck out 25 boxes a day during peak season), but it was far better than most agricultural colleges I knew where the students were on a rota that only saw them on mucking out duty for one week each term!

The Working Pupil situation was quite exploitative though. After leaving college In the late 90s I had an interview with a very well known battleaxe dressage rider to take a working pupil position in her yard. I was told that I'd work 6 days a week In return for training (aka no wages) and was expected to pay her £100 per week for board and lodging! There was no way my parents could afford that so I don't take the job.

Rooftop I think all 3 disciplines were quite different back in the 60s and 70s. In the UK breeding was not specialised and often not recorded. You could buy a fairly "normal" horse for relatively little money and so long as you schooled it well you'd get over the jumps and be able to perform the dressage movements. If you read Pat Smythe's accounts going back to the 1930s and 40s it was also a lot easier to travel around. She would hack 30 miles or so to a show, sometimes camping overnight. You just weren't expected to have all the gear and paraphernalia and could win competitions on a cheap horse with basic equipment.

Internationally we were playing catch up though, particularly with dressage horses. On mainland Europe these have long been bred with carefully recorded histories to ensure you get the right horse for the job. In Britain you might have a fantastic horse but no idea of its lineage meaning you couldn't hope to find anything like it. The sport has changed. The horses are better bred and more expensive. The courses are more technical and/ or larger meaning on the whole you need one of those horses to get round. You can't hack to shows so need expensive transport and the whole thing is just more competitive, more expensive and difficult.

That's just what I reckon though!

Where is Zara Phillips this year? I'll admit to knowing nothing about show jumping but I thought she was meant to be pretty good.

Phillips is an eventer, not a show jumper. She qualified for Rio but wasn't selected.

Thank you gab. Told you I knew nothing about it.

No problem Meglet. I vaguely follow the equestrian sports and am most interested in dressage. People sometimes do move between the three. Since eventers jump and dressage to a high standard it's not rare for them to switch to pure dressage or jumping.