Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Wall of the Cal Guard’s 223rd Infantry Regiment won the 8th Annual National Cavalry Competition this year, beating 54 riders from across the country.

The event, Sept. 24-26 on Fort Robinson, Neb., tested riding, weapons use and military knowledge in four individual competitions: military horsemanship, stadium jumping, mounted saber and mounted pistol. The top five finishers in each event moved to the finals, the Bolte Cup.

Wall finished fifth in two individual competitions -- mounted pistol and mounted saber -- and placed seventh in stadium jumping, which requires competitors to ride their horses over a series of fences.

Including Wall, 15 riders qualified for the Bolte Cup, a challenging and complex course of jumps, obstacles, saber targets and pistol targets.  The course also requires the rider to dismount from their horse, fire a cavalry carbine at a target, and then remount and continue to engage the remaining targets.

“It is truly a test of military horsemanship unlike that of any other organized competition,” said Frederick Klink, vice president and director of the U.S. Cavalry Association, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history of the U.S. cavalry, both horse-mounted and mechanized.

Klink said this year’s Bolte Cup was the most competitive it had ever been, with the top five finishers separated by only nine points. He added that in addition to winning the individual championship, Wall contributed in other ways, improving the competition for years to come.

“This competition was conceived and developed by Jeff Wall and has added significantly to the National Cavalry Competition as an all-around test for a military horse-mounted unit,” Klink said.

Wall noted that people often think horsemen no longer have a place in the armed forces, but that is not necessarily the case.

“It is easy to assume that the use of the horse in modern war is anachronistic, but while we in the United States routinely turn to technology to solve our military challenges, this has not been and is not the case in the rest of the world,” he said.

During the war to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, for instance, Afghan Northern Alliance forces used horses to advance through the country. They also conducted successful mounted attacks supported by American airpower to drive the Taliban before them. In addition, the Taliban uses horses to transport weapons across the mountains on Afghanistan's eastern border.