THE KENTUCKY THREE-DAY EVENT

The Kentucky Three-Day Event is eventing at its highest level: dressage, cross-country and show jumping, ridden by the same horse and rider, at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington in the last week of April.

It takes four days now. The name is older than the format.

The Championships

In 1974 an American, Bruce Davidson, won the World Championships at Burghley in England, and the United States won the team title with him, which gave the country the right to hold the next ones. They were held in Kentucky in September 1978, at a horse park so new that it opened officially the week after. More than 170,000 people came, and CBS broadcast it.

Davidson won again, on an American thoroughbred called Might Tango. The crowds had been large enough that Kentucky kept the event and ran it every spring after, and Davidson went on to win it six times.

In 1998 it was raised to the sport’s top rank, the first event in the Americas to hold it. Until then, American riders had crossed the Atlantic to compete at that level. It is one of the three events of eventing’s Grand Slam, with Badminton and Burghley, and when Pippa Funnell won all three in 2003, she began here.

The Three Tests

Eventing began as the examination of a cavalry horse, and the order of the tests still follows that logic.

Dressage comes first, on the Thursday and Friday: obedience and precision in an arena. Cross-country is on the Saturday: some four miles over solid fences, ditches and water, at speed and against the clock. Show jumping is on the Sunday, over fences that fall, to ask whether a horse that galloped all of Saturday can still be careful.

Between the tests the horses are inspected. At the trot-up, each rider jogs their horse before a panel of vets and officials, and a horse not sound enough to go on does not. Riders dress for it, and the crowd watches as closely as it watches the jumping.

Saturday is the day. The course spreads across the park, and the crowd walks it, following the horses from fence to fence.

What to Know

It falls the week before the Kentucky Derby, when Lexington’s horse country is at its best: the farms of the Bluegrass, and Keeneland’s spring racing, with Churchill Downs an hour and a half away in Louisville.

The Kentucky Horse Park is a working farm and a museum of the horse. Man o’ War is buried at its entrance.

Since 2021 America has had a second event at this level, at Fair Hill in Maryland, in the autumn.

Country attire, and shoes for walking a course that can be muddy.

The Court

The Kentucky Three-Day Event is not the Court’s own. Seats in the stadium for the dressage and the show jumping, and hospitality on the cross-country course on the Saturday, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in the horse country around Lexington, and the table afterward. A member who stays on for the Derby the following week can have both arranged as one.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.