February 17, 2025 
You think you know the game.
A rider enters the ring. She is riding a horse. Together, they negotiate a series of obstacles—jumps—and come out with a score based on time and rails knocked down. The next horse-and-rider pair enters the ring and on it goes…
In the end, someone has left all the fences up and done it in the fastest time. That is the winner.
Some say you ride against other riders. Some say you ride against other horses.
Some say the rider has won.
That is usually the case—the rider with his string of horses, the rider with his accomplishments and accolades, the rider with his carefully-constructed network of financial inputs (this sport is expensive), which he keeps running through personal wealth, sponsor and client support, or criminal enterprise.
Often people say the horse has won.
This is most commonly said by other riders, who look at the winner and her spoils as gifts of fate or circumstance: “If I had that horse…” Every rider in this town, in the world, has the talent to be sitting at the top of the world ranking list, only he hasn’t the horse.
(Sometimes they get the horse and fall straight off. Or ride it one too many times at a fence in a way that “breaks the horse’s heart.” Then you have a “stopper.” Then blame goes all around from rider to trainer to seller, and settles finally on the horse, that now-worthless creature.)
No one ever says the owner of the horse has won, unless that is also the rider.
It is important not to focus too much on an owner, just as one does not focus too much on a single square of toilet paper. One needs toilet paper, of course, unless you have a particularly effective bidet, but even so you’ll be sopping wet down there if you don’t have something (or someone) to mop it up. The main point is—we are talking about things that are, by necessity, disposable.
But there is someone, an individual, some might say an evil genius, who is playing a game all his own. He knows what the real competition is—the horses, the riders, the owners are playing against him.
Like a chessmaster, he hovers over the board, only his board is not made up of pawns and other carved pieces—his board is a vast green space or a plain of sand, populated by living things.
This person is called the Course Designer.
A few weeks ago in Wellington, FL, we at Eyecandyland were visited by one such wizard. He came with his computer and his slides, his advanced software, his years of knowledge. And his smile, that knowing smile, that slightly secretive, slightly sly smile.
“This is how a horse sees!” he announced, and showed us anatomical slides. He slipped goggles over our eyes that knocked out the colors green and red, allowed us to see nearly 360 degrees but not our noses, and made the ground beneath our feet appear delicious.
I had a sudden urge to flee.
“You are prey animals!” he shouted at us. “That is not a branch on the ground—that’s a snake! That is not a leaf skittering across the path, that is a tarantula! And that is not a decorative gate at the bottom of a jump or a set of potted plants on the outside of those standards! No! These are all places where creatures of the most deadly and pernicious kind hide!”
What level of trust would I have to have in this unpredictable and ever-changing world to believe these things were not true? What level of trust would I need in a small, monkey-like creature, chattering ceaselessly by my side or on my back, when my big, strong body could so easily save me?
In the world of course designing, there are levels, and we were talking to a Level 3 course designer. A Level 3 course designer can design any course, up to and including 5-star Grands Prix, but cannot design the Olympics or the European Championships or the Pan Ams—the highest-level competitions.
There are only 12 Level 4 course designers in the world, we are told.
Twelve! “What if they all started dying?” I asked, imagining the plot to a show-jumping-themed murder mystery.
“Then maybe I would have a chance…” our visiting Level 3 course designer muttered to himself.
Later, we assembled on the field in the golden light of the setting sun, measuring distances, learning to construct a curve and a rollback, imagining ourselves as designers, feeling as if another layer of the mystery of our sport had been revealed to us.
Feeling as if, despite it all, there is no greater game in the whole of the wide world.
Like what you read? Catch up on all ‘What the WEF?!’ columns with Erica Hatfield!
Be social! Follow Erica Hatfield & Eye Candy Jumpers:
