According to a recent study, professional show jumpers are more likely to drop a bar at the end of the course than at the beginning. Vertical water jumps and combinations also offer increased potential for mistakes. The risk of a horse knocking down or refusing triple poles and wall jumps is significantly lower, according to Klára Ničova from the Department of Ethology at the Institute of Animal Science at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague.
“We hope that this knowledge can lead to better training to prepare jumpers for the types of obstacles that are more likely to lead to mistakes,” Ničova said.
More than 9,000 elite jumps were analyzed
Ničova and her PhD supervisor Jitka Bartošová, PhD, analysed video footage of 144 show jumpers and 222 horses competing in Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) indoor competitions at five-star level.
The pairs jumped 320 obstacles, totalling 9,114 jumps with a height of up to 1.60 metres, she said. In their analyse, the scientists considered overturned obstacles, refusals and run-outs as faults.
Overall, the horses had a fault in 7.85% of the jumps, Ničova said. And the further away a fence was in the course, they were more likely to make mistakes at it. “Maybe it’s fatigue, maybe it’s stress to get to the finish in time,” she said.
Double combinations – especially the first of the two obstacles in a combination, which had a 13% error rate in this study – had a higher error rate than single obstacles, she explained.
In the first round – but not in the jump-off – vertical water jumps were associated with a noticeably higher risk of error, she said. “Scientists think it might be because of the changes in color in the water or something that makes it difficult for horses to estimate (dimensions) when they’re jumping over,” Ničova said. “Or maybe it’s related to practice. Perhaps riders focus more on other kinds of fences and not so much on water jumps in training.”
In contrast, the risk of mistakes on wall jumps and rising triple poles was particularly low – an unexpected finding, according to Ničova. “I was expecting to see more faults on walls, because, you know, they’re huge! And they’re also vertical. But in the end it seems this doesn’t create that much of a problem for the horses.”
Speed, gender, experience and other factors
Another somewhat unexpected finding related to speed, Ničova said. In the jump-off, higher speed was associated with a lower risk of faults – meaning that these elite pairs do not necessarily sacrifice jumping quality for speed.
On average, horses in the jump-off ran 1 meter per second faster than in their first rounds, she added. Mares ran slightly faster than geldings and stallions.
The sex of the horse, the sex of the rider and the experience of the horse (at five-star level) had no influence on the risk of mistakes, Ničova said. The time of year also had no significant influence, as the study data was collected from October to February. On the other hand, rider experience did, she said. Even at this high level, riders who had previously competed in more competitions suffered fewer faults in both the first round and jump-off in the current study.
Direction of approach: No effect at elite level
As for laterality (side position), the researchers found no correlation between faults and the direction from which the horse approached the fence, Ničova said.
Her team initially assumed that they would find more errors if the horses approached from the right, which requires more use of the right eye and thus the left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere manages routines better, while the right hemisphere handles alerts and novelty better, which could lead to horses responding to a fence with a better jump, she said.
However, the results of the study suggest that this was not the case, which Ničova said could be because the horses were so well trained at a high level.
“The horses at this level are so good that they are trained to be ridden and jump from both sides,” she said. “They may not have side preferences or be a bit asymmetrical. Maybe that’s why we didn’t see any effect of lateralisation, which I thought was a bit strange at first.”
Take-home message
Mistakes in professional jumping tend to occur later in the course with certain obstacles. The rider’s experience also plays a significant role, as more experienced competitors accumulate fewer faults. The researchers believe that these results will help riders to better train their horses for certain obstacles and parcours designers to create parcours with different levels of difficulty.
Source: The study, “Still beyond a chance: Distribution of faults in elite showjumping horses,” was published by PLOS ONE, on March 16, 2022.
