Truths From the Stable Yard Everybody's an Endurance Expert Until the Alarm Goes Off at 4:30am

By Tilly Stirrup

Horse people are wonderfully generous with their opinions.

Give us a grainy twenty-second video from the final kilometres of an endurance ride and, before the kettle has boiled, we've collectively qualified as international judges, veterinary surgeons, meteorologists and experts in equine physiology. It is an astonishing educational system, requiring neither examinations nor the inconvenience of putting on waterproof trousers.

I know this because I am a horse person.

If you've never arrived at an endurance ride before dawn, it is rather a curious place. While most sensible people are still asleep, somebody is wrestling with directional signs in a muddy field as the morning mist hangs stubbornly over the hedgerows. The ride secretary is balancing three telephones, two last-minute withdrawals and a coffee that went cold an hour ago. A veterinary team quietly discusses a horse without noticing the spectators. A steward checks tack with the concentration of someone who knows that tiny details have an irritating habit of becoming very important later in the day.

None of it is glamorous, and almost all of it is voluntary.

Nobody posts photographs of the checkpoint marshal who has been standing in the same gateway since breakfast, quietly waving another horse through. Nobody remembers their name, yet had they stayed in bed that morning, everybody would have remembered their absence. Without people like that, there simply isn't a ride to criticise.

To be fair, endurance, like every horse sport, has not always got everything right. Riders have made poor decisions. Officials have made mistakes. Organisers have occasionally found themselves on the wrong side of hindsight. If the sport is to deserve its future, it must continue to examine its past with uncomfortable honesty.

It usually begins with a video. A grainy twenty-second clip appears on Facebook, often filmed from a single angle and stripped of everything that happened during the other ninety-nine miles of the ride. Before the original poster has had time to put the kettle on, the world's largest impromptu endurance committee has convened beneath it. Officials are swiftly promoted from anonymous volunteers to international villains, veterinary teams are pronounced incompetent, experienced organisers clearly haven't got a clue, and every decision is dissected with the confidence normally reserved for people who had actually been there.

Curiously, very few of them have.

Certainty, it appears, travels considerably faster than understanding.

Raphaël Dubois watched one such online debate unfold with the expression of a man who had seen this particular film rather too many times before. He sipped his red wine with unnecessary elegance before quietly observing,

"Criticism is healthy. But if your concern for horse welfare only exists where there is Wi-Fi, perhaps it is not yet a complete education."

Back at Willowbrook DIY Livery, Sarah "Saz" Mitchell was filling haynets. She had volunteered at enough endurance rides to know exactly how unromantic they really were.

"They're always looking for people," she shrugged. "Vet gate, parking, checkpoints, timing, stewarding... you don't need to know everything. You just need to turn up."

She tied another knot in the haynet before smiling.

"Funny, isn't it? Facebook never seems short of experts, but ride organisers are permanently short of volunteers."

Perhaps that is the awkward truth.

Horse people have an enduring faith in the existence of Somebody Else. Somebody Else will improve welfare. Somebody Else will volunteer. Somebody Else will become a steward, train as an official or spend a damp Sunday directing four-wheel drives and trailers into a field. Yet every organiser, every veterinary assistant, every checkpoint marshal and every steward was once simply another horse person who looked around, realised Somebody Else wasn't coming, and quietly put on a high-vis vest instead.

None of this is an argument against criticism. Heaven knows horse sport needs thoughtful critics, particularly where welfare is concerned. It simply suggests that criticism grows wiser the closer it gets to the stable door. Spend a day in a fluorescent jacket and the apparently simple acquires an inconvenient number of moving parts. Perspective, like horsemanship, is usually learned in muddy boots.

Horse people often ask why endurance is so frequently misunderstood. Perhaps we should spend a little less time asking why others don't understand us and a little more time inviting them to stand beside us?

Curiosity has an extraordinary habit of replacing certainty with perspective, and perspective has a habit of making all of us slightly kinder in our opinions.

The future of endurance will not be shaped by the people who always have the answers.

It will be shaped by the people who are still willing to ask the questions... and who are prepared to arrive before breakfast to discover the answers.