Licenses and Proposed Scoring Changes

I've had a recent hiatus, as you all can probably tell, due to time constraints and a lot of discouragement regarding this topic. It's a narrow and difficult topic to research and almost all of the information I've found recently, while incredibly helpful, is dated at about 2008, the time of the last summer Olympics in Beijing. It appears that nobody seems to be interested in eventing and all of the safety issues along with it, until the Olympics roll around. It's too bad I'm not doing this research project next semester, huh?

Anyway, I've stumbled upon a couple of potential changes to the sport that may alleviate some of the safety problems that are being faced and neither of them directly impact the way courses are designed or the wallets of the eventing bigwigs. The first article deals with requiring the licensing of riders at four star events. This new measure would record dangerous riding, disciplinary offenses, and medical records of each rider in an attempt to curb and hold accountable reckless riders. While this seemed like a viable option in 2008 that was being considered, I have not found any recent information on it and it does not appear to have been implemented.

The second article is quite long and detailed and provides excellent statistics on rotational falls and injuries and fatalities of both horses and riders. One of the interesting proposals of this article is a new scoring system that is less ambiguous about the reason for eliminations during competitions and would allow future researchers to compile more accurate statistics about the number and nature of falls during a competition. The current system allows certain types of falls and fatalities to hide behind vague labels such as "elimination." The current system and proposed system looks like this: