Blenheim Horse Trials 2022

[GucciBear]

What on earth happened with the fences this year? Three horses dead and a rider taken to hospital. Very black day.

There was a Burghley a few years ago with an insanely low completion rate. I think the issue is the course builders want a true 4/5* year but also something that is exciting to watch. Then stupid questions end up being asked of horses and it can be a disaster.
i think badminton did a great job of building a lot of rider scarers/crowd favourites that actually rode well, as to be fair did WEG, that ski jump looked so hard but as long as you weren’t flat out into it it rode well, was a good technical challenge but not stupid.

As far as I’m aware the fences that caused problems were both completely straightforward standard fences which are seen at BE events from 80 upwards - I don’t know exactly what caused the problems but it doesn’t seem to have been the difficulty/technicality of the fences. The third death was due to a heart problem overnight so not directly fence-related.

There’s an interesting discussion on this on H&H forum - one of the posters has looked up the statistics for the last few years and eventing is actually getting safer for horses and riders but there will obviously always be some element of risk in riding.