Picking up the pieces when a show jumping round falls apart

There's a sinking feeling when you ride a bad distance into an oxer, your horse chips a stride, and suddenly the lines stop flowing the way they did in warm-up. The first jump feels fine, the second is a scramble, the third loses all rhythm, and by the time you leave the arena you can barely remember how to put one foot in front of the other. Every eventer has been there, especially anyone who has campaigned a horse through a long season and had their confidence knocked sideways halfway through a course.

I've had my share of these rounds with Archie, my off-the-track Thoroughbred. Some have been at grassroots events in regional Victoria where the jumps are smaller but the courses are still technical. Others have been at venues like Werribee Park or Boneo, where bigger arenas and longer walking times between fences should give you space to recover, but somehow end up making the silence after a rail feel louder than it would in a tighter ring.

Show jumping is the part of eventing most riders quietly worry about. The dressage score may be in the bank, the cross-country the next morning may be your stronger phase, but a messy jumping round eats into your confidence and your leaderboard position in equal measure. What you do in the seconds after the first bad distance matters as much as what you do with your leg and rein contact for the rest of the course.

This is less of a fix-it-in-ten-minutes manual and more a record of what I actually do, round by round, when an eventing show jumping phase goes sideways. It is the routine I have built with my coach, the habits I keep at events, and the way I unpack a disappointed round once I am back at the float with the ramp down and the kettle on.

The split-second where the round changes

The half-stride, the chip, the hesitation before an upright — that is the moment where rounds either recover or unravel, and it happens faster than your conscious brain can intervene. When Archie leaves a stride short to an oxer, I often feel my own weight shift backwards, which is the wrong thing to do on a horse who needs me to stay in front of him. The instinct is to grab mane and ride the front of the jump, but that pulls you out of the canter he needs to actually jump the next fence.

The bad distance itself is rarely the problem. The problem is what you do in the three seconds after. Your horse has jumped from a long spot or a chip, and he may already expect you to rescue him at the next fence. Tense up and you give him a perfect reason to stop.

I have caught myself doing this at Melbourne 3 Day Event warm-ups more times than I want to count. The atmosphere is bigger, the warm-up ring is busier, and the walk from the schooling area to the main arena feels longer than it really is. By the time the bell rings I am already bracing for the worst, not riding forward into it. Recognising the pattern is what lets me reset, even when the first jump of the course is anything but perfect.

Putting the bad fence out of your head before the next stride

A line I picked up from an older rider at a Boneo Park training weekend has stuck with me. Horses do not remember fences, she told me, they remember feelings, so as soon as you give the next fence a purpose, the previous one stops existing for them. The riders who run into trouble after a bad distance are usually the ones still mentally fixing the rail they have just knocked down.

I treat the rest of the course as a separate job. After a rough fence, I pick out the next three things to do and only those. On a bending line off a tricky related distance, my focus narrows to my track, my pace, and lifting my shoulder before the back rail. There is no point rehearsing what went wrong three fences ago, because by the time I have worked it out, the next fence is already in the air.

Outside the arena I do the same with the people around me. A sympathetic groom or chatty parent can be lovely at events, but if I am still on a horse whose last line went in pieces, I find a quiet spot near the truck and keep my helmet on a moment longer than I need to. The horse picks up on whether you are wound tight or settled, and a calm warm-down matters as much for my reset as for Archie's breathing.

Riding the rest of the round like it is your job

A coach once told me that a round really falls apart at the second fence after a bad one, because that is the fence where you either commit or overthink. If I can keep my leg on, my eyes up, and trust my track, Archie usually comes back to me around the third or fourth fence after the disaster. He is generous, as long as I do not telegraph my own panic through my hands.

At bigger Australian events like the Sydney Summer Showjumping Carnival at SIEC or the Adelaide Hills Three Day Event, courses can be quite atmospheric. Big screens, big crowds, and a lot of energy in the air, and it cuts both ways. Rounds where the noise and the dust pulled Archie back into his work, and rounds where the same energy tipped us both over the edge. Riding the rest as a job, not an apology, is what usually keeps us in the arena.

My friend Jess rides a horse who responds well to verbal encouragement after a sticky moment, so she sings to him through the rest of the course. I cannot carry a tune while jumping, but I talk to Archie in a low voice, the way I do when we hack out near the agistment property. It sounds silly written down, but it tells my brain that we are still on a job, not recovering from a catastrophe.

Deconstructing the round once the boots are off

Riding through a bad patch is one thing; learning from it is another. Before I fuss with the feed buckets or ice boots, I sit in the front seat of the float for five minutes and scribble a few notes on the back of my course map. Not a detailed breakdown, just the fences where it went wrong, what I think happened, and the line I should have ridden.

It is tempting to phone a friend or launch straight into a debrief with my coach, but both tend to give me other people's reactions before I have processed my own. Some days the honest answer is that I simply did not commit. Other days the fault was a tricky striding combination, and the line I picked between elements did not suit Archie. Either way, I write it down while the round is still warm, the way a swimmer talks to their coach about a race before the hot shower dulls the edge.

A couple of times a season I have turned these notes into longer posts. There is a recent one on the dressage phase that has more on my process when the day goes well but the marks turn out unexpectedly low — how I handle a dressage judge who gives me a low mark for free walk runs through a similar routine of notes, sleep, and a conversation with my coach once I am out of the heat of the moment.

Training smarter before the next competition

A handful of these bad-distance rounds a season are what push me to do the boring homework in the off week. I book an extra lesson, set up three or four related distances at home, and ride the same line over and over until it stops being scary. My coach is good at building courses out of ordinary-looking elements — a cross pole, a small vertical, and an oxer placed six strides apart on a slight curve — that mimic the awkward combinations at bigger Australian events.

Pony Club Australia has solid resources on training related distances, and I have raided the syllabus a few times for grid ideas. The same mechanics that fix a five-stride line at a training day will fix a longer one at a 2-star, and that cross-pollination between grassroots coaching and competition-level riding has saved my bacon more than once. It is also how I learnt to count strides out loud at home, so the rhythm is in my body before I get to a venue.

I also do a quick mental walk of my course before I pick up a rein at an event. Not the night before, when nerves have crept in, but two or three days earlier, on the lounge with the map propped against a water bottle. By the time I walk the course on competition morning, the first jump does not feel like a surprise, so a bad distance is just a bad distance, not the start of a disaster.

Coming back the next day with a clearer head

Cross-country the morning after a messy show jumping round is a strange opportunity, because most riders either overcompensate or shut down. Archie runs on the energy of the crowd, the line of a galloping track, and the fact that fences on grass are more forgiving to a slightly off stride than those in a sand arena. After a tough day in the show jumping ring, I let him cruise a bit on the steadiest parts of the course so we both remember that eventing is a partnership.

There is an event at Tonimbuk in Victoria where the cross-country course runs through a stretch of eucalyptus forest, and it always feels like the kind of place where the day before becomes irrelevant as soon as you cross the start box. The footing is grippy, the scent of the bush is everywhere, and Archie has stopped caring about the rails we left in the sand arena a full twenty-four hours earlier.

Most of the time, the round that looks like it has fallen apart from the warm-up rail is the round that is still savable from the saddle. Decide quickly that it is not over, keep your leg on for the next four fences, write it down honestly once you have untacked, and come back the next morning on a horse who, nine times out of ten, has already forgotten the whole thing.