The Language Barrier of Equestrian Sport

I have frequently said that terminology is one of the biggest media relations hurdles for equestrian sport. As I write this, the Olympic Games are underway and with three equestrian disciplines being contested, the terminology problem is magnified three-fold.

 

Several months ago I made a post called “The Trouble With the Word Equestrian”. Good examples of the misunderstandings surrounding that word always surface during the Olympics.

 

The printed information at the Games, and the terminology used, is especially important this time because most of the major media is in Beijing and the equestrian events are in Hong Kong.

 

The IOC, national Olympic committees and Olympic organizing committees have, historically, made little distinction between the three equestrian sports or disciplines, using the word “equestrian” as a sweeping description for three very different sports. Although this blog is about media relations for show jumping, terminology from one of the other equestrian disciplines has instigated some of the media confusion at the current Olympic Games.

 

What used to be known as the three-day event is now known as “eventing”. This new word is a common noun turned into a verb that doesn’t actually exist in the English language. That would be fine if it wasn’t so close to a word that is used in every sport. Every competition held at the Olympics is an event. Therefore, when organizers made the Olympic schedule they had columns for day, time, sport and event. For the first phase of “eventing” they used “equestrian” for sport and “team dressage” for event. But there is already a team dressage event coming later in the Games. For the third phase they did the same but used “stadium jumping” in the event column. The stadium jumping event is, arguably, the biggest draw of Olympic equestrian sports. Nowhere did the word “eventing” appear because, how can one event, of many, be “eventing”? Television listings were taken from the same official information.

 

Understandably, some journalists took it to mean that show jumpers would be competing on the day of the three-day event’s show jumping phase. Some even published in advance that certain well-know riders would be competing that day. This was not the fault of the newspaper reporters. Some television viewers may have been very disappointed and blamed the media.

 

In addition, some journalists who looked at results afterwards were led to believe that the riders they had hoped to follow had failed to compete. Only equestrian sport “insiders” would be able too grasp the meaning of that schedule.

 

Would sport organizations allow such confusion between the very diverse sports that fall in the aquatics category? Unlikely. Would a diver be outraged if the media mistook him or her for a synchronized swimmer or vice versa? Probably. There are many sports that are played with a ball, but they don’t call them all “ball” and leave it to the reader to figure out whether athletes will kick the ball, hit it, or throw it.

 

Why is this a media relations matter? Because a sport cannot be covered accurately if it cannot be easily understood. While cynics might disagree, good journalists want very much to be accurate. If they aren’t confident they can be and there are over 300 sports to cover at the Games, they will more than likely decide to take a pass on the confusing one.

Scores Are Integral to the Story

Just the results of any sporting event fail to tell a story, without scores. Yet standard software used to produce the results of show jumping competitions often show money won, instead of scores.  No sporting event can expect to get media coverage if you can’t produce a quick, easy-to-understand print-out of official results.

 

The most successful competitions, in any sport, have gone to “live” electronic results. This is the way of the twenty-first century for any professionally-run sporting event. They are instantaneous and they enable a journalist to cover a competition without being on-site, or to check a detail after being on-site or after receiving a news release.

 

Show jumping can offer some challenges to scoring software that don’t exist in many other sports. For example, 4 faults could be either a knockdown or a refusal. Usually the entry’s time will be a good indicator, but there are exceptions.  An entry who has no score or “DNF” (did not finish) may have retired or been eliminated. Most “live” scoring systems do not specify. Journalists need to know these specifics. Scoring software should also include all competitors. Too often, score sheets or on-line scores only show the top-ten. A particular reporter might be looking for a specific competitor, no matter how well or poorly they did.

 

Whether it is “live”, or just available immediately afterwards, scores are the lifeblood of a story and you can’t expect to get media coverage if you can’t produce them quickly and accurately. You wouldn’t see the Stanley Cup or the Super Bowel covered without mentioning the scores. Who won is important. How they won is doubly important.

The Trouble With the Word “Equestrian”

Terminology makes getting good media coverage difficult in many subject areas. Equestrian sport is one of the most problematic subjects when it comes to language. Those involved in the sport have a lingo of their own. It is well understood by them. Many of them grow up speaking it. It is not well understood by the general public, making it difficult to attract new fans, new participants, and those ever-important sponsors.

This problem can easily be overcome. There are plain-English, replacement terms, for almost every bit of “lingo” that is commonly used in the sport.

Surprisingly, however, one of the most problematic words is “equestrian”. There are a lot of different sports that can be accurately described with this adjective. However, the word is most commonly associated with the three English-riding Olympic equestrian sports. But, the dictionary defines equestrian as “having to do with horses”. That opens up a wide variety of ways in which it can be used.

One of the problems is that it is often used as if it is one sport. A good example is the recent broadcast of an equestrian three-day event on a major American television network. They promoted this broadcast as “equestrian championships”. This was particularly problematic because the equestrian sport involved had received some disturbingly negative coverage shortly before this broadcast in one of the world’s largest newspapers. Therefore, it causes all equestrian sport to be hurt by the negative publicity of one. It is a good illustration of how poor terminology can actually cause “bad press”.

Something similar happened in a Canadian newspaper recently, when they reported that Canadian riders were going to compete in the “Equestrian World Cup”. There are World Cups in several equestrian sports. This was not detrimental publicity, but a good example of confusion that can be caused by terminology that is not clear.

It’s easy to see how the naming of the U.S. television broadcast happened. The equestrian sport in question uses a name that is not sufficiently descriptive for the public or journalists to understand. What was formerly the equestrian “three-day event” (also not sufficiently descriptive, as events that are three days in length take place in almost every sport) or “horse trials” (somewhat better) has undergone a name change to “eventing”. The network was clearly trying to avoid the use of this noun-turned-verb that offers no description of what is going to take place.

But, media relations for show jumping is the subject of this blog. The choice of the American network is just offered as an example of how problematic the word “equestrian” can be.

One way to overcome the problem would be to have more descriptive names for each of the sports that fall into the “equestrian” catagory. “Equestrian jumping” or ”horse jumping” would be an improvement over ”show jumping”.

Clear, plain-English terms make anything easier to understand. There will be many future posts on improving the lingo of this sport to make it more media-friendly.