(“The scab will heal and fall off.”)

As an addendum to my World Cup remarks, here’s my take on the Steffen Peters disqualification. If you just came out of your cave, Steffen was eliminated in the freestyle final for blood on his horse’s flank. The cut apparently occurred when Legalos shied violently at a crowd distraction, and Peters inadvertently snagged him with his spur as he tried to stay on. Blood on a horse (whether on the horse’s side or in his mouth) is cause for immediate and unchallengeable elimination. Steffen and the chef d’equippe were both gracious in the face of this misfortune, and Peters expressed his disappointment as you’d expect.

Each person deals with the stresses of competition and with adversity in his or her own way. I wouldn’t pretend to put words in his mouth, but seasoned “Been There, Done That” riders with a long term investment in the sport are more apt to be philosophical with its vicissitudes that a goggle-eyed teenage Pony Clubber would be. It doesn’t mean caring less or certainly not trying less hard. Serious competitors are (mostly) all trying to exorcise the inner demons planted in their souls as over-achieving children. But in the larger scheme of things, this bump in the road is only that. Steffen is fine. The horse is uninjured, neither in mind or body. The scab will heal and fall off.

I’m guessing that to World Cup or Rolex spectators (especially the ones who come home with the ball caps, the t-shirts, and four thumb drives full of photos) the excitement and romance of the experience is greater than for many of the riders. If you’ve got sponsors, of course (like Nuke Laloosh in Bull Durham) you know the right words to say. “Honored to represent my country,” etc. “Just want to help the Team, God willing.” But in a certain sense, the less a rider can persuade himself to make of the pageantry and the Moment, the easier it is to concentrate on the job at hand.

Back in 1978, the Kentucky Horse Park opened to host the World Three Day Event Championships. At the end of an exhausting, grueling weekend, Bruce Davidson (senior) emerged the winner, successfully defending the title which he’d won four years earlier at Burghley, England. At the time I wondered on the heels of such a triumph, what do you do next? How do you celebrate? I mean, is it only Super Bowl MVPS who go to Disney World?

Back then you couldn’t check the on line message boards to find out. You had to wait for The Chronicle to show up in your mailbox. When it arrived, the answer became clear. A week after his beatdown of the entire rest of the eventing world, Bruce was entered in the Training Division and the Prelim on a pair of horses at an inconsequential Virginia horse trials that I’d never heard of. Why? Because that’s what riders do. They ride. And afterwards they ride again. And it shouldn’t be any other way.