It may be just my vintage, but I am cringing at the thought of eventing being re-named.

We are all worried about its long-term prospects within the Olympics, but I simply don’t get how a new moniker will make any difference to the sport’s popularity with either the IOC or the wider public.

I am the first to admit that I don’t understand the psychology of branding. I sat through a number of branding presentations when on the full-time staff of a well known magazine, wishing they would just finish so we could back out there and hunt down the news for which we’d been famous the previous 100 years (sorry, maintaining our “core values.”)

I do know, though, that people much cleverer than me have made a fortune out of becoming branding experts. Now it seems more dosh is going their way, with the FEI considering paying a branding consultancy to look into the desirability of re-naming eventing.

One favoured idea is the cumbersome “equestrian triathlon.” Whoever is pushing that one does not understand the sport. In all other kinds of “athlon” the component disciplines are of equal influence and merit https://horsesport.com/cuckson-report/eventing-or-triathlon-sorry-folks-they-are-simply-not-the-same/. Fiddle any further with the balance of skills, and all the hard work to make cross-country safer has been a waste of time.

A friend points out that equestrian triathlon clumsily mixes Latin and Greek. Correcting the language, he couldn’t really see Equi Trebus or Hippo Triathlon catching on, either.

The second thing to consider is that the populace always abbreviates long labels. If riders still described themselves as three-day eventers, the norm in the ’70s and ’80s, newcomers would have more of a hint about what they do. We got the derivative “eventing” because everyday language is essentially lazy. Furthermore, the non-prefixed “eventing” was subtly encouraged when the sport evolved and the vast majority of competitions were taking place over any number of days.

European countries who still refer to eventing as the “military” at least pay homage to its historic roots.

Will any branding exercise consider why show jumping is attractive, despite its non-literal name? No one even seems to mind that it is now referred to by the FEI simply as jumping. That is surely confusing, because eventers do two types of jumping compared with the one type practised by those officially called jumpers. I much prefer, the German, springen.

The only thing that grates with me about “eventing” is that a noun has been corrupted into a verb, as in “this horse is suitable to event.” This is now so entrenched in the lexicon you will never re-train people to say “this horse is suitable to ride in the sport of eventing.” By that same principle, what is the realistic chance of conditioning riders to say “I am an equestrian triathlete?”

Any kind of name is a form of identification. That is all. It could just as easily be a number (i.e. 7-11, 501s).

Eventing will remain marginalised, because a snazzy new name isn’t going to make it any less expensive to build a cross-country course or to broadcast.

If you Google for the most successful re-branding exercises of all time (and we all know what the non-literal word Googling means), only a teeny number of the results involve an actual name change. (I don’t think that adopting an abbreviation really counts, as in AOL and KFC).

Facebook is non-literal, but there can’t be a person on the planet, aside from any still undiscovered tribe in the Amazon rainforest, who doesn’t know of its existence and function. When Facebook realised they were onto something epic, they didn’t worry that “the Facebook” was a colloquialism common only to university students in North America. The most they did was drop the preposition. If a literal label is significant, why didn’t the social networking alternative MySpace come out top?

When Datsun became Nissan in 1986, the new name took three years to establish and cost $30 million in marketing support (over $60 million in today’s money). It cost $100 million to change Andersen Consulting to Accenture, and they only did it to distance themselves from a scandal. Even if the FEI has that sort of money to spare, there are many other ways it can be better spent on eventing. Bunking up prize-money is one.

The inaugural running of the indoor “Express Eventing” at Cardiff, UK, in 2008 got more headlines than the rest of the one-day events in the UK that year combined. It was only partly connected with the fact it was a debateable new format staged indoors or even, sadly, because of the demise of a much-loved horse. The main interest was because it awarded the UK sport’s still record first prize of £100,000.

Moving images on TV, presented more than half a dozen times a year, are only way to get eventing in front of a wider public to the extent that the penny drops and folk are drawn into the excitement of cross-country and the drama of how it can all unravel for the leaders when the show jumping is staged on the final day.

Until that is magically turned around, there isn’t going to be any large scale injection of cash leading to the big prizes that attract media coverage. And it won’t be easy, for one message coming through loud and clear from respondents to all the proposed Olympic format changes is that the cross-country must remain at the heart of the athletic effort and not be made any easier, despite the desire to encourage younger equestrian nations.

Only a minority of popular sports have names that describe what they do. Golf isn’t called hit-in-hole. Curling isn’t shoo-stone-over-ice. Cricket isn’t whack-ball-with plank. Does anyone in the western world think Formula One is a milk product for infants?

When you do have a literal label, does that make things any more understandable? Netball is not as high profile as Basketball, which also involves popping a ball through a net.

The one equestrian sport that really does need re-branding already has a literal label. Its endurance, whose original values have been corrupted so far beyond salvation by the Middle East that, out there, it’s just something to be endured by the horses until they break and are replaced by the next batch of imported unfortunates.

I have just had a brilliant idea. Let’s follow Rugby and Marathon and re-name eventing after the place that re-invented it. Oh, sugar-sticks! Badminton has already been taken…