On Saturday, the USEF announced that, due to a lack of international entries, the CH-Y 2* at NAJYRC next week has been cancelled. The NAJYRC Reining has been cancelled in its entirety, but as Reining has been limping along as the FEI’s least robust discipline, and the buy-in from mainstream North American reining to FEI Reining has been grudging at best, I’m neither surprised nor heartbroken. On the other hand, I’m gutted for Canadian Eventing. The FEI rules for a championship such as NAJYRC stipulate, quite reasonably, that at least two nations must be represented in the team competition. And so they should. You can’t call it an international championship if only one flag turns up. That means Canada could not scrape together even three 2* riders 21 and under to go to one of the world’s top equestrian venues, the Kentucky Horse Park. The 1* championship is still going to take place, and a non-championship CCIYR2* will run for the Americans who would have been in the 2* Championship.

Where have all our young event riders gone? The complex set of factors leading to Canadian Eventing’s current perilous situation are too sophisticated for this blog, but clearly there are a few obvious causes that I can throw out to you:

1. Money – topping the list, as always, is the issue of dollars. Eventing is probably the least financially gratifying discipline (noted exceptions being the real international super stars), and yet in many ways it’s the most expensive. Sure, the horses tend not to be pricey to buy, and entry fees (not to mention outdoor paddock stabling fees) are still dirt cheap compared to almost any other kind of equestrian competition. But to do more than trot around a super-extreme-green course takes a good chunk of time out of one’s day. Cross training for even one star level eventing is a serious commitment – and as we know, time is money. To be competitive these days you have to have a dressage coach, a jumping coach, and three sets of tack – two will get you by, but just barely. And your cheap horse costs at least as much to feed, shoe, keep healthy and sound, as any dressage or jumping horse.

2. The Death of Pony Club – actually the Death of Pony Club is a symptom, rather than a cause. It’s merely a chain reaction from the Death of Pony Club to diminishing numbers in Eventing. And what is causing the Death of Pony Club? The ever-earlier specialization trend in riding. Kids don’t want to do a bit of everything any more. They want to put a tick mark by one discipline, plaster their bedroom walls with photos of their show jumping or dressage heroes, and pursue their narrow goals as if they all had Tiger Moms. This problem also relates to my first point, above. Being competitive in riding is no longer a matter of being a really talented kid who could get a donkey around a Prelim XC course. With the likes of the World’s rich and famous buying strings of mounts for their precious prodigies, it’s near-impossible to even consider entering the sport at a competitive level without some golden horse shoes in the tack trunk.

3. Promotion (or absolute lack thereof) – I have long been moaning that Eventing is the most underrated adrenaline sport around (except in the UK of course). Pry any weekend football fan off the couch and plant him within 20 meters of even a two star water jump (have we invited the Ford Brothers to the Pan Am XC yet?), stick a heart rate monitor on him and you are sure to see an encouraging spike every two or three or five minutes (maybe make sure there is a beer tent no more than one minute’s walking distance from the water complex). We don’t have to look very far to see the root of the promotion problem right here at home. Go on the discipline pages on the EC site for Dressage, Jumping, Para and Eventing. Now just try to find ANYTHING on the Eventing page that references young riders or young athlete development. Don’t waste too much time on it if you don’t want. You can take my word for it that there is NOTHING. I don’t even know if we have any one star riders competing in Kentucky next week (though I have to assume we do, since the one star division hasn’t been cancelled) because I can’t find any press releases – either on the EC site or in my email folder for EC – that mention NAJYRC Eventing at all this year.  Dressage used to be the Canadian champion of navel gazing, but it’s cleaned up its game considerably in the past few years and left the Eventers in the dust as the discipline least interested in promoting itself for its own good. If Eventing doesn’t even do an adequate job of promoting itself within the equestrian community, how is it ever going to attract new athletes or sponsors?

It’s no wonder they had to put two four star horses on the Canadian Pan Am team for this year – the pool is small, and apparently the creek running to it has dried up. I remember the 2007 Pan Am Games in Rio, where Jessica Phoenix cut her young team teeth on the course and never looked back, winning individual gold four years later in Guadalajara.  If Eventing in Canada doesn’t receive some intensive nurturing, and soon, all that incredible hard work done by the elite athletes we so proudly count as our own will be for no more than their own edification.

The blogger in me hopes there will be some cock ups to write about next week in Toronto, but the lifelong Eventing lover in me hopes that the discipline gains some new fans at the Pan Am Games thanks to some great sport and at least bearable spectator conditions. Rather than improve access or parking, or invest in logistics to handle big crowds on XC day, the fine folks at TO2015 decided to sell only 5,000 tickets for XC. That’s a pretty modest gathering to be spread around a few kilometres of track (there were over 30,000 spectators in Mexico four years ago); I sure hope I see what looks like the sold out audience the TO2015 website is telling me exists. And that means more than 50 people at the water.

There are many wonderful people involved in Eventing in Canada, and around the world. Today’s post is not in any way intended to undermine their work, volunteer contributions or athletic achievements. But Come ON Canadian Eventing. Let’s Go. Eventing. Now.