How to Read a Horseball Result, Field by Field

A horseball result looks like this:

XVI · 2011 · France · Montpellier – EquiSud · France, Spain, Belgium

Five fields. Edition number in Roman numerals, year, host country, venue, then gold, silver and bronze. Once you know the shape you can read the whole competition history in a couple of minutes, and a few things jump out that a narrative account would bury.

The edition number is the useful part

Because it does not track the year. The European Senior Championship reached its sixteenth edition in 2011 having started in 1992, which is sixteen editions in twenty years. The missing years are 1997, 2004 and 2008.

Those gaps are not random. 2004 was the year of the first Junior European Cup at Lamotte-Beuvron and the year the FEI recognised horseball as an official discipline. 2008 was the first World Cup at Ponte de Lima. The senior championship stepped aside for the sport’s expansion, which is a reasonable trade and also the reason edition numbers and years have to be recorded separately.

The venue field tells you about money

“Montpellier – EquiSud” is not a stadium, it is a horse show. So is “Paris – Salon du Cheval”, “Fiera Cavalli”, and “Wembley – Horse of the Year Show”. A sport that holds its championships inside other people’s events is a sport borrowing an audience, and for most of the period covered here that is exactly what horseball was doing.

Ponte de Lima in Portugal is the exception worth noting: it hosted the 2008 World Cup, the 2008 women’s championship, the 2008 under-16 championship and the 2011 Champions League. Four titles at one venue suggests a facility that met the Organisation Rules specification and a host willing to keep doing it.

The podium field, and the thing it does not say

France, Spain, Belgium. Read down the senior column and the gold entry says France sixteen times consecutively. That is the single most striking number in the sport’s record and it flatters nobody, including France, because it means the competition has never been decided.

Two places in the record break it. The under-16 championship, where Spain won three. And the Champions League, where the entries are clubs rather than countries: Chambly, Cardedeu, Caramel, Blanzac, Arles, Club de Campo. Belgium never won a senior European title, but the Belgian club Caramel reached four of the first five Champions League podiums.

Which raises a question the record cannot answer: whether France’s national dominance was depth or selection. A country whose clubs lose European finals while its national side wins every one of them is doing something specific, and the results format does not have a field for it.

The host column and the podium column disagree

Worth reading side by side: hosting and winning are barely related here. Portugal hosted five of the recorded events and won none of them. Italy hosted four and took one senior medal in that period, a silver in 2006. France hosted the most and won essentially everything, but France also won away, so hosting is not the explanation.

The one place a home advantage looks real is Austria’s single bronze at Wels in 1999, and one data point is not a pattern.

Reading the same table for what is absent

Three competitions appear in the structure with edition numbers and no results at all: a Champions League for under-16s, a European American Cup, and an Asian Cup. Two of them carry numbered rows, which means somebody laid out the table expecting to fill it.

That is a different kind of information from a result. A federation that has drawn up an Asian Cup and never held one is telling you where it intended to expand, and the gap between the intention and the record is the honest measure of how far it got by 2012.

The women’s championship has the opposite shape: an edition that certainly happened, in 2012, whose podium is not in the record. One is a plan without an event; the other is an event without data.