Moreton BE abandoned

I know it is frustrating for people having got up in the middle of the night and spent £££ on fuel but spare a thought for all the organiser having to deal with cross competitors. These are after all people who are giving up their time for free so that people can compete, if people did not volunteer then think how much entry fees would be if they had to pay all those volunteering.

Yes they might not get it right 100% of the time but they are doing their best and people are so quick to complain and are often so ungrateful towards volunteers that that I am surprised that they can get volunteers. My friend who events and I do fence judging for BE once a year at least and often take a day off work to do so and it is a long hard day especially if it rains or is really hot and our petrol is not reinbursed either!

Having done a lot of fence judging in all sort of weather and having seen horses needing the horse ambulance it is important that it is possible to access all parts of the course if need be and this can be difficult to test in the dark and it may well be that the horse ambulance was not booked to arrive till a certain time and could not come earlier at short notice, so they were not able to check access any earlier.
 
This is a genuine question, not being smart . . .

Surely eventing in the UK in March is always going to be a dicey business? It's hardly a time of year you can rely on having nice weather (not that you can ever rely on it but March in England . . .well, there is a reason the rest of the world thinks it rains all the time here!) so surely entering now is always going to be a crap shoot? There is now rule that says you HAVE to enter, just because something is running so surely it's accepting a known risk? And it's hardly the event's fault if the weather does go bad. Okay, BE could prevent them from running but then people would scream there aren't enough events . . .

Almost everywhere else in the world the season is MUCH shorter than here, and that's the trade off. If you want to make sure there can only be competitions in the most reliable venues, at the most advantageous times to minimise the risk of cancellation, then there aren't going to be too many events! You rolls the dice, you takes your chances . . .

(And I agree with all the above about the work, time, money etc. that goes into events. NO organiser WANTS to cancel and it's a nightmare when it happens. And no matter what decision you make, some people are going to be unhappy.)
 
oldvic said:
wessexyeoman -
To those who thought they should have been let know earlier, there is never a good time to cancel. All factors have to be weighed up, decision taken, disappointment quickly put to one side and then deal with letting everyone know while fielding questions, making other decisions and coping with people who think everything revolves round them. And guess what competitors, if the decision is made at 8 a.m., you are not going to know at 8.01 a.m. Just stop and think what else needs to be done and how many volunteers also need to be contacted. Delegating the jobs also takes time and it all needs to be systematic or something gets missed. It is not only about you.
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Whilst I accept that It is not only about me and that safety has to be put first, something which I have not ever questioned or stated I question...I do still find it bloody frustrating to get to a 5 miles from a event and see lorries coming back and the first I know that it has been cancelled is to ring someone I know who is judging. The text message saying it had been cancelled did not come through until sometime after i had turned round which was well after 9.

However I do accept that i could have been more graceful this morning in the heat of disappointment and frustration. For that i APOLOGISE.

However, forgive me for being thick (and please realise that I have only ever run at morton twice before and found it to only be VERY WELL RUN), but why on earth could this not have been foreseen?

I appreciate that it takes a huge amount to run morton or indeed any event, and the disappointment for all involved must be huge BUT surely a horse ambulance by its very design should go every where? If not, why are they not attached to a Landy or such like? Surely the jump judges can get to the fences, so if they can why can't the ambulance or indeed why can't it be attached to a tractor?
 
Horse ambulances ARE towed by 4 wheel drive vehicles but that doesn't mean that the trailer will have enough traction especially with an injured horse in. They are low loading trailers so won't necessarily sit level behind a tractor. A fence judge only has to get to the fence and stay put, not get to an incident quickly throughout the day. The intensity of rain has differing effects on the ground - you can have steady rain that soaks in ok or heavy rain on firm ground that makes a grease pan so it's not so easy and the organisers will be looking to run, not looking for reasons to cancel.
With regard to the text, in areas where there is no signal they don't come through the minute you get a signal, it can be hours or even days later so they are not totally reliable. Dorset is not renowned for having a great signal! There were in excess of 200 entries to let know as well as volunteers. That is no small task. They will not have sat down and had some breakfast and a chat and then decided they might send a couple of texts in case someone hadn't arrived.
In the grand scheme of things, that you got a text a little later than you wanted is hardly a big deal. It was only stopping you getting a few miles nearer a competition site not a war zone.
 
oldvic said:
Horse ambulances ARE towed by 4 wheel drive vehicles but that doesn't mean that the trailer will have enough traction especially with an injured horse in. They are low loading trailers so won't necessarily sit level behind a tractor. A fence judge only has to get to the fence and stay put, not get to an incident quickly throughout the day. The intensity of rain has differing effects on the ground - you can have steady rain that soaks in ok or heavy rain on firm ground that makes a grease pan so it's not so easy and the organisers will be looking to run, not looking for reasons to cancel.

Genuinely thats quite informative - thanks for that - it explains a lot.

As for the point about texts - think we will have to agree to disagree, I think that sending a message a 1 hr after the event has been cancelled is too late in this computer day and age, but hey ho, Ive had a gin now and am telling myself that everything happens for the right reason!

PS. looking forward to next morton event and I am very greatfull for all the effort all people put into events, hence i also volunteer...
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sympathies to all involved - competitors & organisers - but can't help thinking that if the cancellation notice had fully explained the reason for the late decision people would not have got so snitty about it.
 
fwiw I was there on the Sat and although the ground was lovely, there was already some cut in it. You could see the 2nd day was going to be a bit softer. However, I stayed in the area overnight at home and it rained and raind and RAINED!

The irony is, Moreton is given this date as the ground normally drains very well, and hopefully is going to have an end of season fixture too as a result of this (not in 2011) which goes to show how bad the weather was for it to cancel.

Still, a fabulous event :) sad not to have been helping.
 
irritatingly the ground is fine - and as of yesterday afternoon it was fabulous. repairing it after saturday was one of the easiest repairs i have had to do. in fairness, if this was our unaffiliated event next weekend, we would have run - because that event doesn't have a horse ambulance.

it does drain quickly but will remain slippy at the surface for a while and it was that slippiness, with a 4x4 towing probably a tonne of injured horse and trailer that could not be guaranteed. moving across a slight slope would probably have resulted in the trailer slipping sideways, dragging the 4x4 with it....bigger drama etc

on communications, i think we hit the bdwp site for text alerts at about 8.15 and the important thing is to get the message out that the event is cancelled - the detail is less important at that time.

i am grateful to those who have appreciated the whole problem and hope others now have a better grasp of what is involved - certainly there is a hell of a lot to do to manage a cancellation and whilst competitors are likely to be alerted by bdwp, volunteers are not and each of the 100 or so volunteers needs a prompt alert as well... of course some are already on site but scattered all over the place.

like all organising issues, 90% of the time available is spent on 10% of the task, such as answering the few who had done dressage on where their test sheets have got to - which is a fair question but it sucks someone into an area that is less critical when i am trying to deal with the major tasks as fast as possible.

like anyone running a business - if you don't run events like a business you have no idea how much money you re losing - protecting reputations against unguarded comments is very important. the initial comments here would have left the casual visitor thinking we run cluster **** events on the fly without any consideration for consequences - and we don't, and so i don't make any apologies for stepping in and saying it as it is. in fact we had the NFU risk assessors here on saturday (and next saturday for unaff) to study how we run events so that they can get a proper feel for what they are insuring here and elsewhere... and it would be no less than a disaster for them to simply google moreton and find the first couple of pages of comments.

on eventing in march, this is the first cancellation in 30 BE and unaff evets we have run in early march. BE allocates its events based on where is going to be a very good bet, and we are a very good bet for this time of year - rain can happen anywhere, any time and even tourists know it rains all year round in the UK, not just in early march. so again, BE isn't casual about what events it runs, and where - cancellations cost BE money too.

finally, thanks to the one or two who have messaged me clarifying what they meant to say... got it, and thanks.
 
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