The Horsebox problem

How far is too far to go jumping?

At 4.17 on a Thursday morning, somewhere between Calais and Bruges, the international equestrian industry is already underway. The horsebox is warm, the coffee is questionable, the groom has probably been awake for at least 48 hours straight and the horse is standing in the back eating hay while its humans contemplate whether Belgium was really worth leaving home for before breakfast.

For the horse, this is simply another day at work. For the sport, it is the beginning of another few hundred kilometres in the name of competition.

Horse people are accustomed to this. We pack the passports, find the missing boot, load the hay-nets and set the satnav for somewhere that seemed like a perfectly reasonable destination when the entry form was filled in. Equestrian sport is geographically awkward in a way that athletics and swimming are not. The athlete has four legs, weighs rather more than your average gymnast and is unlikely to be persuaded that an EasyJet flight would be more convenient.

Competitions require land, stabling, arenas, veterinary facilities and enough space to accommodate several hundred people who have all arrived carrying rugs, so the horse goes in the lorry and we drive ... A lot.

This has become slightly awkward because equestrian sport has also discovered sustainability, a word now appearing with increasing confidence in competition brochures, bid documents, federation strategies and presentations in which somebody has used a photograph of a horse standing in a field to illustrate the future of the planet.

The GEF, naturally, has a sustainability strategy. It has a framework, a roadmap, a working group and several people whose professional lives presumably involve deciding whether something should be described as green, greener or progressively environmentally aligned. There are targets, commitments and carefully considered language about reducing the sport's environmental footprint, which is all entirely sensible.

The difficulty is that somewhere between the sustainability roadmap and the next five-star venue, the horsebox still has to get there.

There is another reason to notice the mileage. Diesel is an increasingly painful line on the

competition budget, particularly for those travelling long distances with a horsebox. At the sort of competition where the lorry has its own bedroom, fridge and television, you can spend more on fuel getting there than some people spend on their entire entry fee.

The groom is generally in there too, because somebody has to produce the horse at the other end looking as though it has spent the journey in a five-star hotel rather than standing in a moving box for six hours.

We have therefore managed to create a sport in which the athlete can travel by road, by air and occasionally by road again, all so that it can arrive somewhere with a nice arena and jump a course designed to look effortless. The horse, to its credit, appears to regard all forms of transport with roughly the same enthusiasm.

The travelling becomes particularly interesting when we look at the new super leagues.

The Global Champions Tour and the Premier Jumping League LLC have taken elite jumping and turned it into an international circuit of high-profile venues, with horses, grooms, riders, teams and equipment moving from one destination to the next. The model is commercially clever and undeniably attractive. The sport gets spectacular locations, big crowds, television audiences and a calendar that gives elite jumping a much stronger sense of occasion.

It also gives the horsebox and planes very busy diaries.

There is nothing inherently wrong with international competition, and nobody seriously expects top-level equestrian sport to become a local riding-club league conducted within cycling distance of home. The question is rather more uncomfortable: how much of this travel is necessary, and how much has simply become part of the product?

Alejandro Ferreira, President of the GEF, is naturally very enthusiastic about the future of global equestrian sport. Alex has made a career out of explaining how tradition and progress can coexist, usually while standing somewhere expensive in a beautifully cut suit and being photographed beside something described as an exciting new initiative.

At the GEF's latest sustainability event, Alex was photographed beside an electric vehicle looking suitably thoughtful while a procession of horseboxes arrived behind him.

Nobody asked how far they had travelled.

This is not entirely Alex's fault. The modern competition is a complicated machine. There are sponsors to satisfy, television audiences to attract, hospitality areas to fill and elite riders who would quite reasonably prefer to compete somewhere with an arena rather than a field containing three sheep and a Portaloo. Spectacular venues sell tickets and attract investment. International competition is part of what makes modern sport commercially viable.

But the sport cannot simultaneously talk about reducing its environmental footprint while pretending that the journey to the competition is somehow happening outside the competition.

If hundreds of horses and their grooms are travelling between international cities, if riders and support teams are following them, if equipment is being moved from venue to venue and if some horses are being transported by air, then those journeys belong in the environmental account of the sport. They do not disappear because everybody was very efficient with the cardboard cups once they arrived.

The calendar matters too.

A young rider progresses from local competition to regional, national and international sport, and eventually the map can become rather impressive. There are training camps, qualifiers, tours, finals and increasingly sophisticated circuits designed to keep the best horses competing in the best places throughout the season.

The sport has become very good at creating reasons to travel.

Perhaps it should become equally good at asking whether every journey is necessary.

Could calendars be designed so that horses are not repeatedly crossing Europe for essentially the same level of competition? Could regional competition reduce some of the mileage? Could organisers consider where competitors are coming from before choosing yet another glamorous venue? Could transport be consolidated where possible, rather than sending an assortment of lorries in roughly the same direction at roughly the same time?

None of this requires abandoning international sport. It requires admitting that transport is part of the sport.

The GEF's sustainability department can measure it, put it into a report, produce a pleasingly modern infographic and possibly organise a panel discussion about it. Eventually, however, somebody has to decide what the numbers mean. That is the less glamorous bit.

There is something faintly odd about an industry congratulating itself for reducing the environmental footprint of the competition while treating the journey to the competition as though it happened somewhere outside the event.

Perhaps the most sustainable horsebox is not the one with the cleverest engine or the nicest green branding, but the one that makes one journey instead of three. Perhaps the most sustainable competition is not necessarily the one with the prettiest sustainability report, but the one that gives people a good reason not to drive another 500 miles.

And perhaps, before Alex Ferreira stands beside another electric vehicle and tells us that the future of equestrian sport is sustainable, someone might show him the competition calendar and point out that where you put the competitions determines how far everybody has to travel to get to them. A calendar designed with geography in mind could keep horses closer to home for part of the season, group venues sensibly, reduce unnecessary crossings of Europe and perhaps even save a few thousand litres of diesel before the first sustainability presentation has been opened.

The horse won't have an opinion. It will travel wherever we send it, eat its hay and get on with the job, perhaps the humans could at least decide where it has to go.