United States Eventing Association

Any series of logs, ditches and banks can be called a cross-country course, and for lower-level horses and riders, simple and straightforward is far preferable to spooky and technical. Going up the levels, courses become progressively more difficult and more interesting, and at some of today’s bigger events, the cross-country course can showcase sponsors, entertain spectators and challenge horses and riders to the extreme.

Course builder Eric Bull of ETB Equine Construction in Scottsville, Virginia is currently building the cross-country course for the Pan-Am Games in Toronto, in cooperation with Greg Schlappi of South Carolina. He also built the course for the $50,000 Eventing Showcase in Wellington, Florida in January and his regular work includes The Fair Hill International and Plantation Field International three-day events, Fitch’s Corner Horse Trials and more. For more information about Eric and his crew and to check out their selection of cross-country and show jumps, visit www.etbjump.com.

Difficulty

We’re doing a lot of bigger courses right now. When people ask me what’s my favorite thing that I do as a course builder, that’s the fun part. I always assumed everyone thought that way, but that’s not always the case; some people like building smaller fences, or prefer less pressure. There’s less thrill and precision to building the lower levels. I like the fact that you can do more with the upper level fences; the great horses are jumping incredible things. At novice there are only so many ways you can vary things, so to me, the thrill is really with the advanced horses.

From the building perspective, the lower levels are pretty straightforward; you really just have horse jumps on a track. It’s supposed to be easy and inviting, training confidence in the horses and building them up for the next level. You have both amateurs and professionals using those courses for different reasons, but these courses are basically over nice rolling terrain and include straightforward fences. There are fewer jumps that are smaller, and things aren’t “related," or connected.

At the lower levels, if something isn’t perfect, like a bit of footing, the horse can compensate; at the upper levels there’s no room for error since the jumps are bigger and tougher. On a low-level course if you have a bad result, or too many problems at a fence that’s too difficult, or just not inviting enough, most of the horses will stop at it. You have to do quite a lot to change that; if it’s a spooky Trakehner, you could have made it one inch smaller and the results probably would be the same. But at the upper levels, a table might be turned a few degrees more than the horses could deal with, or the footing too soft for them to push off of, and that can cause a lot of problems. You can change the variables at the upper levels by just ten per cent and it makes a huge difference, whereas at the lower levels it probably wouldn’t make any difference at all.

At the upper levels, the course designer tends to make more changes as the week goes on. They have to work really hard to make it a balanced test; things that seem tiny and insignificant really can make a difference, so as a builder you spend a lot of time doing all these seemingly less significant things that are simply part of the job to make the course perfect.

As a builder, if you find yourself questioning something at a big event, you have to follow it through. If you ever wonder if anything, like the footing, is good enough, you have to follow through until you believe there is no way to make it better, and then you are finished. You can’t just say, “Well, it looks good enough." I always do an ethical test and ask myself if I followed through and did everything possible to avoid any bad situation. If you answer all the questions to the best of your ability, you’ve done your job and the rest is really up to the horses.

Safety

There’s always a lot of talk about frangible devices, but safety is much more about preventing accidents in the first place, not just making accidents “safer." Look at highway safety: there’s so much effort to keep you from doing the wrong thing, and devices to keep you safe in case of an accident. But as drivers, we need safe roads and signs that make sense. We wouldn’t accept that the Department of Transportation just throws sand bags out to keep drivers safer on bad roads. You’re much better off when horses try to jump on good, consistent footing over well built jumps that are put in the right spot than when they do make a mistake and you help them with a frangible device. Frangible devices have a place, but better to have a safe situation in the first place – just like you’re better off not crashing your car than you are crashing into something “safe."

There’s a little more pressure on course builders to keep things safe as the stakes get higher. As a builder, you’re working with the course designers, who have more pressure on them at the big events, and obviously that comes down to you too. Also you’re putting more pressure on yourself because you know that everything has to be just right. The pressure at the upper levels is detail-oriented and comes from things like adjusting the footing by rolling it and softening it and so on, as opposed to the lower levels where the pressure comes from having to set up four tracks on time, under or over budget. All of those restraints pound on you at any competition, but at the high performance the stakes are higher.

Fair Hill, for example, is a lot of work: it’s 120 or 130 horses running, and the courses, at two and three-star level, involve about 80 horse jumps. It’s two high performance courses, sheer volume, and now we have the USEA Young Event Horse competition happening across the road, too. That’s one’s a monster, but the thrill of high performance keeps you coming back for more and pulls you through. It never seems like a hard week because there’s so much anticipation and so many things you enjoy doing that the work doesn’t seem like work anymore.

Sometimes when you have 90 low-level jumps to set up, it feels more like work. But that’s what we get paid for. We’re all working for different reasons: paying bills and private school and vehicles, but you’re also working to make the sport better at the upper levels. That job satisfaction is what keeps you coming back for more.

There are lots of things you can do to earn a living and pay bills, most of which you can stay home to do. A lot of the adversity in this job, like long hours in all kinds of weather and weeks spent away from home, is offset by the satisfaction of doing the high performance courses. Something has to keep you coming back, to make you do crazy things like drive through Washington, D.C. traffic twice a week!

Plantation and Fair Hill are interesting because you have all the low levels and it’s a huge volume of work through the competition season, with the added bonus of doing the high-profile, high performance competitions at the end of the season. Having high performance at an event brings up the standard of everything, all year long. A lot of people put a lot of effort into Plantation and Fair Hill all year, which raises the bar of all the competitions at the venue in a way that you don’t see when you look from the outside. They get sort of an intrinsic return on their investment from the lower level competitions.

You have to understand high performance to understand the whole picture; the lower levels are feeding the upper levels. You need people at the top like Derek di Grazia, who also designs Kentucky, who know how to draw horses and riders up through the levels. If the courses and infrastructure aren’t there, people won’t make it up through the levels to compete at the four-star.

You also have to have the horsemanship to do high performance. If you didn’t have that, you wouldn’t have really good people who are perfectionists in the sport who want something really challenging. Folks going Novice see an Advanced course and that may get them excited to do better. Once you understand high performance, you understand how to break it down and use the lower level courses to teach people how to get to the top level.

Creativity

The upper levels are definitely tons more fun to build. You’re starting with a bigger “box” and there’s more you can put under the horse. For instance, on a cabin there’s room for windows and doors and more detail, the bigger the box gets. A Beginner Novice box is really 25% the size of an advanced box so there’s literally less room to be creative.

There are also more combinations at the upper levels and visually having two or three fences decorated the same way looks more significant than a single small fence out in the middle of the field. You can put groups of little fences together to make them more interesting, but something like the Head of the Lake at Kentucky is a huge complex with lots of options, so you see all these jumps that look really impressive.

There is also more money available to build high performance jumps because you tend to have sponsors for individual fences, and the sponsors also bring new ideas to you. It’s always about trying to do something different; really they’re all just square boxes, a cabin or table or whatever, and every day I try to create a different box than the day before. That’s easier at the upper levels because you seem to be able to do more. When you look at the course that we built in Florida, it was really pretty.

The other thing that happens at the lower levels is you tend to be running four levels at one time, so you don’t have the resources for something like Kentucky, where they have 40 jumps; I just laid out Plantation and we dealt with almost 90 jumps over four levels. That’s twice as many jumps that have to be decorated, so your resources become spread thin.

It’s always interesting at the upper levels when you have horses show up who are fantastic athletes with hours and hours of training and competition behind them. At the lower levels, even the really good horses just aren’t as well trained and experienced. The upper level horses are able to conquer some incredible feats, and they can make mistakes and recover. Horses also tend to jump bigger jumps better – the upper levels are big and impressive and horses have to respect them. It’s true of any sport; it’s the reason NFL football is on TV every Sunday and Monday night. There aren’t as many high school athletes, and they’re not as good, but when those high school guys start to play NFL they’re given the resources to perform at their best.

If you’re going to build a course for a high profile, high performance competition, you are pushed to be creative by the organizers and course designers. It goes hand in hand with competitive people by nature that you always want to outdo what you did last time. It’s fun to work with a lot of people who are trying to do things better every time. Nothing is ever good enough, and sure, that can be frustrating, but it can also be motivating. You can lay out an awfully nice track and still have part that’s not perfect, which gets you out of bed the Monday after that competition to create a better turn or a better jump or better footing for the next event.

Plantation is a real model of high performance people driving perfection. Phillip [Dutton] and Boyd [Martin] are on the committee now and they are pushing Plantation to always get better. Boyd always wants to get better, better, better, and it’s really motivating to work with people like him. If there’s such a thing as 100% perfect, it’s easy to get to 70%, it’s harder to get to 75%, and darn near impossible to get to 95%. It takes energy and perseverance. Clearly Kentucky has been managed that way and Plantation and Fair Hill are going in that direction. At the well-run places, somebody will always find the money to make things a few percentage points better. At some facilities, nobody wants to put the resources into management, or financing, or the extra work to make the event better.

I look back on the work I did five to ten years ago and at the time I thought it was pretty good, but you come a long way and look back and say, wow, things weren’t as good as I thought. The first set of triple brushes I built were for the Pan-Am Games at Fair Hill. Those same exact jumps are now on Preliminary courses; they were 6 ½ and 7 feet wide at the back and 4-41/2 feet face spread. The new Advanced triple brush is 4’ wide at the back, 18” – 2 feet at the front, and 5 ½ -6 feet base spread (front to back). In the beginning, people were having trouble with 6’ but as horses and riders got better and better, course designers had to keep upping the ante.

The lower levels have gotten harder too but I think that’s a whole different can of worms. As I said before, the low levels are meant to feed high performance. That’s what drives the whole sport. I’d like for people to really understand how the low-level courses relate to the upper-level courses, to get a glimpse of the big picture, so the whole thing becomes more fun.

The challenge with safety is that that things are very subtle; it’s having rounded corners that are a little kinder, but not so kind that horses don’t respect them and don’t jump them well. On a daily basis we struggle to build big, impressive fences that horses can glance off of.

At the top of any sport, you’re pushing the limits, and if you don’t push the limits in eventing, it’ll be a dressage show because there are so many good horses out there. This is where the subtleties matter: at the upper levels a few inches matter, and how hard you make a corner really does make a difference between really impossible, too easy and just right.

That’s the brilliance of course designers like Mark Phillips and Derek diGrazia, who can find that middle spot week after week. At Novice you expect more horses are going to get around, but of course it often works the opposite way; at Beginner Novice level, half the horses may spook at some orange flowers and don't finish the course! You look at a course like Fair Hill and it always looks impossible, which makes it so impressive that so many horses show up and jump it well.