Olivia Inglis: Riding into a dangerous pursuit

Olivia Inglis’s death casts a light on the pull — and perils — of eventing.

Riding into a dangerous pursuit

The equestrian cross-country course at Scone in the NSW Hunter Valley is designed for beauty as much as strong competition, filled with dappled light, stringybark gums and rolling gullies.

17-year-old Olivia Inglis who was killed during an equestrian competition in Scone last week. Picture: Facebook

At 9.20am last Sunday, Olympic stars Stuart Tinney and Shane Rose were among the competitors preparing to take to the course.

The first three riders already had made it past the eighth jump — although one had retired without completing the course — deeming the 6km track studded with jumps and obstacles challenging but manageable.

The fourth, Olivia Inglis, 17-year-old daughter of Charlotte and Arthur Inglis, whose surname has been synonymous with the bloodstock trade for 150 years, was riding the family horse, Coriolanus. He cleared a vertical jump but tripped and fell on the next obstacle. Olivia, trapped beneath him, was killed.

Reeling from the tragedy, coaches, stars of the sport and fellow riders cite Olivia’s grace, talent, and experience. She was young — and riders competing at higher levels are getting younger, the sport admits — but Olivia was careful and adept, they say. Coriolanus, who also was ridden by Charlotte Inglis in events, was above reproach, too.

A shattered Tinney tells Inquirer in the aftermath, “it was, tragically, just an accident”.

But Sunday’s tragedy has thrown a spotlight on the glamorous world of equestrian eventing, and its strong pull for wealthy young girls dreaming of Olympic stardom.

Eventing — also known as the equestrian triathlon for its dressage, show jumping and cross-country components — demands exquisite skill, natural talent and money to succeed at the highest levels.

Its natural enemy has been animal rights activists, who say the sport puts horses in harm’s way.

But during the past decade even those dedicated to the sport have asked serious questions about the safety of the riders.

In a compassionate speech at the Equestrian NSW Awards on Wednesday night, state Sport Minister Stuart Ayres addressed the equestrian “family” and said, pointedly, “you are always welcome in the state of NSW”.

But in the lead-up to the 2012 London Olympics the global governing body for Olympic equestrian events, the International Equestrian Federation (FEI), was forced to respond to a spate of fatalities stretching back to the late 1990s, and the future of the sport at the elite level was in jeopardy.

In Australia, before last weekend, the only four deaths in the sport’s modern history were those of Anna Savage, Tasha Khouzam, Rhonda Mason and Mark Myers between 1997 and 2000.

A review by the FEI instigated new restrictions on every element of the pursuit, from the grading of the horses, to the fences and the distance between them. It also subjected course design to three layers of scrutiny and constant assessment.

A burst of funding around the Sydney Olympics boosted safety and coaching standards across Australia.

Yet on Sunday, at the eighth fence at Scone, somewhere in the four paces before the vertical jump of 8a and the oxer jump of 8b, Olivia’s mount clipped a rail and entered into a rotational fall.

The most feared accident on any course, rotational falls happen when a horse trips and falls in a somersaulting motion.

Event organisers don’t like to discuss them publicly — it is difficult to predict how and when they will happen — but behind the scenes they have been trying to eliminate these falls. It may be that despite the science and engineering that goes into course design, rotational falls are impossible to prevent.

These falls tend to be fatal or result in catastrophic spinal injury to rider or horse.

In a double blow for the Inglis family, deeply passionate about the animals, Olivia’s horse Coriolanus, who initially was thought to have survived the accident, suffered a displaced fracture in his neck and was euthanised three days later.

Two years ago at Scone, Samantha Dernee had a brush with death.

Now 16, she is in the midst of her first season back on the competition circuit after sustaining horrific injuries at the Scone Horse Trials in a freak accident in 2014. Samantha was in the camping area when an accident on the horse left her with a smashed pelvis and broken back, confining her to a wheelchair for an excrutiating four months.

“It’s just the way the sport is,” Samantha says. “You try and minimise the risks, and while these things rarely happen, you know what you’re getting yourself in for.”

Samantha competed against Olivia. In November she sold Olivia her beloved mount, Irish gelding Branigans Sub Zero, also known as Frosty.

Before her accident Olivia rode Frosty in the dressage at Scone — with mediocre results, but it was early days. The two girls were text­ing on Sunday morning and Samantha wished Olivia luck.

Samantha’s own accident didn’t put her off riding, and neither will Olivia’s. “People who love riding will continue to do it.”

Carlene Barton, a respected coach and competitive rider, says it’s difficult for people outside the sport to understand it.

“It upsets me deeply when people say it’s a dangerous sport,” she says. “It does have its risks, but I wouldn’t say it’s as dangerous as motor sports or even rugby.

“Eventing is a partnership with horse and rider, it’s quite different from any other sport. We’re in the sport for the love of the horse and the unique opportunity to form a partnership with it. We’re always working within the bounds of the horse. There’s an understanding of the way each other thinks. Without the horses, we’d be nothing.”

Barton’s daughter also was competing at Scone the day Olivia died.

“Does this change the way I view the sport?” Barton says. “Will it change the way I manage my coaching and my daughter’s approach to the sport? The absolute short answer is, no it won’t.

“As a coach and as a mother I’m always deeply aware of the duty I have to keep the sport safe.”

When speaking to competitive riders in Olivia’s event, one fact is stark: she was competing on the same course alongside Olympians and riders decades older.

The number of junior competitors across NSW grew by 10.7 per cent to 1939 in the past year, while the number of broader competitors has fallen by 2.1 per cent to 3506, according to Equestrian NSW’s latest annual report. Younger competitors also are attempting to compete at elite levels.

“The age of riders has decreased,” Equestrian Australia chairwoman Judy Fasher says. While some riders still may compete in the cross-country in their late 70s, she says, “now you’ve also got children starting in the lowest levels at about age eight, and in days gone back they were aged between 11 and 18.”

As riders become younger, their skills are also better.

“Coaching is better organised and more regular, and the skill level of the children has increased exponentially,” Fasher says. “That’s carrying through to the age at which they’re mounting Olympic campaigns, and they’ll run a horse business as well as compete at Olympic level.”

Olivia recently had jumped up a grade to compete in the prestigious two-star category, a midway point in an international system that grades competitions from novice at one-star, to Olympic at three-star, and an elite international level of four-star with only a handful of competitions worldwide.

Riders and horses have to show the requisite skills to compete in the higher grade.

The system was tightened in 2013 when the FEI introduced “reverse qualification” measures in which a rider would be dropped down a class if they were eliminated from two successive events or three events within a year.

Two weeks before the Scone Horse Trials, Olivia had tested herself in her first two-star competition, riding Coriolanus at the Sydney Summer Classic one-day event, as one of just four junior competitors in a field of 25.

On the day she earned her best score in the cross-country event, coming in at 15th place.

“It’s a more challenging standard and the jumps can be very technical — they can be angled and require a lot of thought,” a fellow competitor, who does not wish to be named, tells Inquirer. “But she was very talented.”

Friend and fellow equestrian Olivia Lalak, 1`7, competed at the event as well, the two girls representing their prestigious private school, Frensham, as equestrian captains.

It is no small title.

They were the leaders of a 40-strong squad of equestrians at the NSW southern highlands boarding school of 300 girls, testament to the sport’s appeal to young girls from families with the means to fund the pastime.

“People outside the sport don’t really know that much about it, but when they get to understand and realise what we do every weekend, they begin to respect us,” Olivia Lalak says. “I mean, our best friends are our horses, and it’s pretty cool.”

Committed riders, says Frensham school principal Julie Gillick, who also rode when she was a young girl, “tend to radiate humility — accepting responsibility when things don’t go so well in competition and giving all credit to their horses when they achieve success”.

They “develop the highest levels of self-discipline, grit and determination”.

Olivia Lalak has never had an accident. Even so, her parents insist she wears a chest protector and a separate air vest that inflates like an airbag when it senses her detaching from the horse, to cushion a fall.

The air vests and the chest protector are not regulation but back protectors are — another more recently instituted riding regulation.

Kiwa Fisher, a member of the Scone Horse Trials incidence response team, was fixated on safety as he strolled around the cross-country track with its course designer on the warm Friday evening before last Sunday’s tragic accident.

A steady procession of horse floats was making its way into the grounds, kids who had arrived early were jumping around on bikes, and eager competitors were walking the course to see how best to navigate the copses of trees and undulating hills.

“Everyone was calling out that it looked great and they couldn’t wait to ride it,” Fisher tells Inquirer. “There was just a buzz around the place, a really happy atmosphere.”

Forty-eight hours later, as Fisher collected rails in the nearby show-jumping ring, his two-way radio crackled with the horrifying news of Olivia Inglis’s accident.

There has been a consensus among those involved in the event that Olivia’s horse simply “made a mistake” and little could have been done to have changed the outcome on the day.

Says Fisher, “There are significant inherent dangers dealing with such a big animal.”

Nonetheless, in the days since the tragedy, the committee has been asking questions and assessing how to improve the event for the future.

“We need to understand how a relatively simple mistake can have such tragic consequences,” Fisher says. “That’s what everyone is working towards.”

Additional reporting: Sam Buckingham-Jones