The National Championship

["guest@endurance.net" <guest@endurance.net>]

k s swigart katswig@earthlink.net

  Terry,

I think you (and many other people on RideCamp) may have
misunderstood me.  I didn not want to say, don't have the ride, but
rather don't bestow the title "AERC National Champion"  because
nobody will agree as to what that ought to be.

Certainly, (no offense meant to the competitors) the winners of
this year's ride did not earn such a title. (I am not saying that
the winners were not champion caliber horses and riders, but rather
that their accomplishments at this ride were not sufficient to
prove it.)

I think that a nationwide ride, sponsored by the AERC, with some
qualification criteria, that moves around the country is a great
idea...which is why I liked the idea of the AERC Classic (much like
the Kentucky Derby or the Breeders Cup of TB racing...they are
after all, called "Classics" and winners of such races are called
"Classic Winners" not "National Champions").

Endurance already has serveral "classic" rides: Tevis and the OD,
without doubt...the ROC when it existed, and the Cosequin Challenge
in rapidly moving that way.

It may be, however, that the only way to get people to come to a
"new" ride like this is to dangle the phoney title of "National
Champion" in front of participants (rather than doing it the way
Cosequin Challenge did which was to dangle cash...and the ROC
dangled a trailer). (But that didn't work this time, nobody showed
up anyway.)

And if you look to the example of TB racing, you will also note
that the way they choose their champions is by voting on it (the
"Champion Three-year old" is the one that won the Eclipse
Award...and those are bestowed by people voting which horse is the
best three year-old of the year--taking the performance of the
whole year into consideration).  Presumably they do this because
the TB industry has the noux to know that winning one race, no
matter how prostigeous the event does not a champion make.  Eclipse
Award winners have to put together a whole string of successes...in
the year that they win the award (last year's effort doesn't
count), and it has to be a whole string of successes against good
horses (winning 12 of 12 claiming races won't put you in
contention), and frequently the Breeders Cup will be the deciding
race (a big race at the end of the season that all the winners over
the course of the year attend, and the Breeders Cup people
understood that to allow the Breeders Cup to be a dedicing race,
they had to get all the horses to attend so something had to be
done about how to get good horses that weren't nominated to pony up
the "supplemental nomination"--so they lowered it.)

My simple solution to the "we can't agree what it means to be
champion" was to not bestow the TITLE on anybody (I didn't mean to
not have a national ride).  There are plenty of sports who don't
have titled champions....and those that do, usually require that
their champions perform well over the season and/or win a whole
tournament which may include a series...or a series of series.

The winner of a big race (whether that race is the Kentucky Derby
or the Tevis) is a classic winner, not a champion.  Call the AERC's
national ride the AERC Classic (or the AERC Challenge as Bev Gray
recommended) and you won't have people complaining that the winner
didn't earn the title of Champion.  As long as you call it the
National Championship ride, there are gonna be people who are gonna
balk.

If you want to bestow the title of Champion, you will have to get
people to agree how champion is defined....and that just ain't
gonna happen in endurance.

And if you want to get people to come to the national race...the
best way would be to lower the cost of entry.  The cost of entry in
such a ride is not the entry fee, but rather the time and money it
takes to get there. (The Cosequin Challenge people offest the costs
by offering prize money, last year's World Championship in Dubai
did this by paying everybody's expenses for getting there.  PAC did
this by having fund raisers for the "teams.")

By all means, have a national ride.  I hope the idea takes
off....but no matter what you call it, you still won't get me
calling the winner "National Champion."  The winner of the AERC
National (call it that if you want) is no more a "National
Champion" than the winner of Tevis. (Just as the winner of the
Kentucky Derby is no more a national champion than the winner of
the Belmont---string those victories together...that's what makes a
champion).

So Garrett Ford's idea of the "Triple Crown" was also a nice idea.
Specify certain "classic" rides as being part of the "Championship
Series" with the AERC National as the one towards the end of the
year (like the Breeder's cup) being the final "classic" which may
very well end up being the deciding race for horses that have done
well in the other classics during the course of the year...and you
have a more meaningful championship, and more people would be
wililng to say "Yes, that horse earned its title of champion."
(myself included).

This, of course, becomes a bit of a problem when it comes to
deciding a 50 mile champion, since the AERC does not currently have
any nationally recoginzed "classic" 50 mile rides.  But then, the
TB industry has the same problem with deciding a Sprint Champion,
because in TB racing "classics" have to be run at "classic
distances" and in endurance 50 miles is not recognized as a classic
distance any more than 6 furlongs is recognized as a classic
distance in TB racing.  But good sprinters still show up for the
Breeder's Cup Sprint (probably as much because it is the richest
sprint in the world).

I am not saying have a national championship series (as it has
already been tried, and nobody much showed up for that either), but
rather, specify rides that are already established as being "classics"
that people already show up for because it is recognized that they
are prestigeous rides and make them a part of the "Series."

I am not saying we should do exactly what the TB racing people do
(or any other sport for that matter), but it would behoove us to
look at what they do, and why they do it.  And it is also worthy to
take note that in virtually all sports that have championship
competitions that competition is the last one of the year....so if
the AERC wants to have its "championship deciding ride" in roving
places around the country (i.e. even places where it snows in the
winter time), then the ride year needs to end in
September/October...not at the end of November.  This is a change
that would not be very hard to make.

kat
Orange County, Calif.


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