SPECTATOR SPORT
Jumping into tragedy
Simon Barnes
EVIL things come in threes. This is a cher- ished belief and it was being clung to with some urgency at Burghley Horse Trials. I was there on the first dressage day and I have never felt an atmosphere so fraught at a sporting event, not among the competitors — competitors are always fraught at every important event, that is their job. It was among the administrators, those who work at these events, the journalists, that you found this quite extraordinary level of tension. For three people have been killed in acci- dents in cross-country this season. And all everyone wanted was for this event — the biggest of the season after Badminton — to pass off without a serious accident. The hopes and prayers were to no avail. A fourth evil thing came to the sport. Simon Long was killed when his horse hit the top of a fence, flipped and landed on top of him. There was something almost inevitable about it all. So many people hoped so des- perately that it would not happen that such a disaster seemed pre-ordained. The fear that hung over the event seemed to demand a release.
It has left the people in the sport in a state of bewilderment. This is a risk sport but, as the Burghley winner Mark Todd said almost plaintively: 'We don't expect to pay for it with our lives.'
The only thread that links the four acci- dents is that they all happened to top-class international riders. They took place at dif- ferent sorts of fences, at different speeds.
There is a working group that looks after safety, and which has made thousands of improvements in the design of fences. Safe- ty equipment — body-protectors and hel- mets — has never been better designed, and is compulsory.
After the third death, two weeks before Burghley, the general mood was sombre enough, but people sought comfort in the thought that it was only a dreadful run of bad luck. This is not a way of laughing things off, just an acceptance of the fact that riding horses over big fences is a dan- gerous business, and that some people are prepared to accept the dangers and take on the fences in pursuit of beauty and glory.
But this is a death too far. It seems that we are forced to conclude that the sport is the victim of a malign curse, helpless victim of an intangible evil force. Either that, or that the sport is a profligate wastrel of its people. Neither of these things is true — the truth is to be found in the feeling of helplessness and despair. Rodney Powell, an event rider and a great friend of Long's, asked, 'How many more bad days can the sport take?'
It is one of those ineluctable facts of life that when we have had precisely as much as we can take, then it is a certain sign that Fate has got his eye in, and the real troubles are about to begin. Sorrows come, like the 49 bus, in battalions. It is odd to feel com- passion for an abstract entity, but I do feel most dreadfully for this, the pleasantest and most stirring sport of them all.
There will be all kinds of discussions about safety, and rightly so. There will be talk of image, too. I will leave these things for oth- ers: I have nothing to offer. All I know is that there is only one way to deal with the 49-bus periods in life: that is to grieve, grieve horri- bly, and then attempt to carry on, possibly wiser, certainly sadder.
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