The Burghley Young Event Horse (BYEH) competition attempts to identify young horses with the potential to excel in the sport of eventing. The competition includes a basic dressage test, a show jumping course and a conformation assessment. Judges are advised to reward potential rather than the degree of training or rider ability. The main aim of this study was to determine whether a correlation exists between scores achieved in the finals of the four and five-year-old sections of the final of the BYEH competition and British Eventing (BE) points achieved by age eight. A second aim was to determine whether or not the BYEH scores of horses that go on to achieve points in BE differed significantly from those that do not.

Data were obtained from the Burghley Direct Web Page and from records supplied by British Eventing. Data were analysed for 43 four-year-olds and 77 five-year-olds that competed between the years 1998 and 2001. The BYEH scores for horses with and without BE records were compared using Student's t-test.