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A crash-test horse is helping to make a thrilling sport safer. An overhead
cable swings the metallic mount into cross-country fences to reveal how fence
builders can make eventing safer. Four of Britain’s 8000 event riders were
killed in 1999 when their horses hit fences, somersaulted and landed on top of
them. So the sport’s regulator, British Eventing, brought in impact experts from
the Transport Research Laboratory in Crowthorne, Berkshire. TRL’s Andy Mellor
built the 470-kilogram New Equine Dummy (NED) which showed that horses would
flip if they hit the fence with a large vertical force. A new trial fence has a
pin which breaks and drops the bar if the vertical force is severe.