.........Continued........ Eventing (or sometimes referred to as Horse Trials) originally evolved from the training of cavalry horses. The sport is rather like the pentathlon in that it combines different disciplines in one competition and is run on a cumulative penalty basis. The competitor with least penalties at the end is the winner.

The first test is dressage, which comprises a set sequence of compulsory movements in an arena 20 metres wide and 40 metres long (60 metres at higher levels of competition). One or more judges judge the test and are looking for balance, rhythm, suppleness and most importantly: obedience of the horse and its harmony with the rider.

The SJ phase is one round of jumping with a maximum time allowed and the objective is to jump all the fences clear inside the time. The fences are not as high as top level SJ, but are quite substantial for horses that are not specialists at SJ. Fences knocked down and refusals incur penalties as does exceeding the time allowed.

The third phase is the XC where a course of natural obstacles has to be jumped, again inside an optimum time; being over the time incurs penalties and being well under the time is of no benefit and unnecessarily tires the horse. Stopping at obstacles, or falling off also incurs penalties.

All horses need to build up their levels of skill, the sport has different levels of competition: Novice, Intermediate and Advanced through which horses progress as they score points and gain experience. This leads to an interesting feature of the sport, which is that all riders compete in Novice classes with the top riders on their young horses competing often against relatively inexperienced rider who can and do beat them on occasions. Also men and women compete on equal terms - there are no distinctions or single sex classes. More.....