www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/sports/29helmets.html?_r=2&src=meDressage Riders Embrace Helmets, to a PointBy JILLIAN DUNHAM
LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Olympic dressage rider Courtney King Dye has no memory of the day last March when she jumped on a horse she was training, to demonstrate its progress to its owner. With inexperienced horses, she liked to wear a helmet as a safety precaution, but it was the busy winter show season in Palm Beach, Fla., and she was in a hurry.
She was cantering when the horse slipped and fell. King Dye went down with the horse, fracturing her skull. She was airlifted to a hospital, where she remained in a coma for several weeks. After months in rehabilitation, she is regaining her speech and the use of her right side, which she lost completely after the accident.
At a major dressage competition in Palm Beach the day after King Dye was injured, the practice area looked very different. Riders who normally wore baseball caps to warm up were wearing helmets.
“It was overnight,” King Dye’s mentor, the Olympic dressage rider Lendon Gray, said of the switch many riders made to helmets.
Helmets are required in equestrian sports that involve jumping, including eventing and show jumping. But in the highest levels of dressage, a balletlike test of a sensitive horse’s training and gaits, riders wear a top hat, which provides no protection. Although serious falls are less common in the competitive dressage arena, accidents can occur at any time, when horses slip or misbehave or when they are startled. Many dressage riders never wear a helmet, even while practicing.
But it seems that is beginning to change. At the World Equestrian Games here this week, a few prominent riders have been wearing helmets in the practice arenas.
Steffen Peters, an American dressage rider and the 2009 World Cup champion, could normally be recognized in the practice area at major competitions by his baseball cap. Since King Dye’s accident, he has traded his cap for a helmet.
Peters said that going to the hospital to see King Dye, a teammate of his at the 2008 Olympics, was one of the most difficult things he had experienced.
“When I walked outside, I had to sit down,” he said. “I was crying like a little kid, I felt so helpless.”
His World Equestrian Games teammate Katherine Bateson-Chandler also wears a helmet in practice, as do all the members of the Canadian dressage team.
Dr. Craig Ferrell, who has been the United States equestrian team’s doctor since 1996, said wearing a helmet made sense.
“If you’re on a horse long enough, usually you’re going to come off and I think there’s a chance of hitting your head when that happens,” he said. “You’re a lot safer wearing a helmet.”
A 2007 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that horseback riding resulted in 11.7 percent of all traumatic brain injuries in recreational sports from 2001 to 2005, the highest of any athletic activity. Last year, there were 14,466 emergency room visits for brain injuries among riders, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
At the World Equestrian Games, the vast majority of dressage riders were not wearing helmets in the practice arena. Many of those riders come from Europe, which has dominated dressage for years and where top dressage riders typically do not wear helmets.
Rachael Sanna, an Australian rider, has worn a helmet for years, but none of her teammates here do.
“They’ve all come from Europe,” she said. “When I get here and put my old crash hat on, they all go, ‘What are you doing?’ ”
At the world games, three of four German dressage riders warmed up in helmets, including Matthias Alexander Rath. Rath was present when the United States Olympian Guenter Seidel was seriously injured in a fall in June. Seidel was wearing a helmet. “From that day on, I said it’s stupid not to wear a helmet,” Rath said.
Peters’s American teammate Tina Konyot sometimes wears a helmet when she rides inexperienced horses, but she does not ride her Grand Prix horse, Calecto V, in a helmet and said she would not here. “You’re not going to go and change anything” right before a major competition, she said.
In an interview with The Chronicle of the Horse earlier this year, Konyot said she had a photograph of herself as a child, riding without a helmet or a bridle, jumping with her arms out to the side. She had learned to ride that way, she was reported saying, and whether she wore a helmet now was a personal decision.
Ferrell, who is also the chairman of the medical committee of the International Equestrian Federation, the sport’s governing body, said he planned to convene a meeting to discuss helmet use.
“I don’t mind bringing pressure to an organization to consider changing the rules,” Ferrell said. “If you make it a rule, everyone becomes comfortable with it. Eventually you’re not a dork for doing that.”
Such a change would very likely encounter opposition, even among riders who support helmet use.
“I’m a proponent for helmet use, but it’s totally up to the individual,” King Dye said in an e-mail typed with her left hand.
While issuing statements in support of helmet use, the United States Equestrian Federation and the international federation have stopped short of saying they would require helmets.
“U.S.E.F. would support if it is felt from that individual discipline that they want to go down that road,” the organization’s president, David O’Connor said.
Many say that King Dye’s accident has helped make helmet use more acceptable, at least in North America.
“I know people personally who feel a certain relief that they now have permission to wear a helmet,” Gray said.
Since March, King Dye has recovered the ability to speak and walk with assistance. Her ambitious rehabilitation plan involves a return to international dressage, where she says she will lose the top hat in the competition ring.
“I will definitely wear a helmet to show,” she wrote.
At the World Equestrian Games, Peters, the American favorite, will warm up in a helmet, but he seemed to be grappling with the issue of wearing one in competition.
“I’m an extremely superstitious person,” he said, explaining that he had worn the same tailcoat and top hat for 22 years, including during the Olympics. “As much as I’d like to compete in a helmet, I’m still arguing about it with myself.”
