Some eons ago when I showed obstacle, there was quite a friendly competition among area club members, we all wanted to end up with the most points for the year, and there were some members that were super at it. The decorations for the event included 32" sized painted horse cutouts around the arena proper, they were well done and looked realistic. Well you guessed it, most of the entries thought it was a live horse, and of course there one was right at the ground tie obstacle. Lots of bug eyed and stretched necks and nickering, some did move. Did not seem fair! Ha! Well I was lucky my 2 guys stayed put, but they were certainly fooled and talking to that 'horse'! Also there were 3 set ups (3 obstacles) in a row, one for each judge! It was really too much.
Was it deliberate, or just coincidence that cutout was placed just so? Who knows, but we were all laughing because the horses were so funny looking at it. . At the nationals hay bale thing, I have a sneaking suspicion that it was placed near the beginning to weed out entries early because there were so many, of course being on an elevated platform was hard also. I felt sorry for so many of the kids working so hard to get to nationals and could not finish the class. But when you are at nationals it is not easy to predict everything, and it is supposed to be hard.
At one of the AMHA nationals I attended, the jumping class had what I thought was an unfair jump - The cross bars were painted the color of the arena footing and hard to tell it was a jump until right upon it. There were no flowers or anything else on it.
I only watched a little bit of the jumping this time, did they have jump-offs and raised the bars higher like they used to?