Lowest Score Wins

There are talks afoot of changing eventing scoring to 'make it easier to understand'.

One of the propsed changes is to have highest score win. If you're involved with horses it doesn't take long to understand the scoring. No need to change on our behalf then.

So on who's behalf is this change? One reason I've heard is that it will make it easier to understand for the non-riding public.

Excuse me? What a load of rubbish.

Plenty of sports are won on lowest score. Golf for instance. A sport I suspect many the people proposing this change are playing than managing the sport if this sort of change is the type of rubbish they are even considering entertaining.

We make it even easier for non-horsey viewers by referring to the score in terms of penalties and faults. Any idiot can see that to win you must have lowest faults. Are the people in favour of this change accusing the viewers of being idiots. I see the problem in attracting their attention here. They're treating you with the contempt you deserve for looking down on them.

Besides, any school child can tell you that adding up is easier than taking away. As it is we only have to do one subtraction - taking away the score of the Come Dancing, sorry dressage, phase away from 100.

Then it's a simple case of easy to understand adding on penalties. Simple.

And for the public watching on TV it's even simpler. The dressage phase doesn't get the coverage of the proper, exciting sections. The dressage scores are presented to the viewing public fait accompli when coverage starts. They neither know nor care that the scores have been worked out one way, highest best, then subtracted from 100.

Please let's not have the poncey subjective stage extending it's influence not just over the final result (FEI multiplier - pah!), but on the way the sport is scored overall.