It's interesting to observe that the top performing show jumpers and eventers fail far more than they win, yet they are considered great performers, and rightly so. Of course no one wants to fail and no one wants to lose. What separates champions from everyone else is not just accepting that they will fail sometimes, but actually embracing it and recognizing that it's part of the sport and it's fundamental to learning and moving forward. Great riders are also great failers.
Failure is at the same time both overrated and underrated. Pretty much all of us we were taught from a young age that failure was to be avoided at all costs. In school for example when a student raised their hand and gave the wrong answer they were told they were wrong as the teacher moved on and searched for the student who could provide the correct answer. The student who gave the wrong answer was sometimes laughed at by other students and at the very least learned that only the correct answer was rewarded. If their confidence was dealt a severe enough blow they could feel stupid and feel reluctant to answer next time even if they were certain of the answer. Many people like to stand out from others, but only when they are rewarded otherwise it's just an exercise in humiliation.
However, failure is severely underrated as an opportunity to learn. In sport, just as in life since failure is inevitable and so it only makes sense to recognize that and turn it to our advantage. Like every thing in life when we experience failure we have a choice. We can see it as confirmation that we aren't good enough and, combined with other failures in life, get the compounded feeling that we never will be successful and should just settle for what's easy instead of pushing ourselves to try harder or something new. Yet, if we shift our mindset and re-frame the failure as an opportunity to learn a new lesson from it it fundamentally changes not only how we think but also how we perform. The ability to do that is one of the key factors that separates champions from everyone else. They examine their failure, understand what went wrong, take steps to correct it, see if that works, make other adjustments as necessary, practice it until they excel at it and then move on.
The challenge for many athletes is that they put in so much time and energy into getting good at what they do that they put a lot of pressure on themselves to succeed. Sometimes part of the problem is an internal feeling of needing to be perfect which adds an extra layer of difficulty in accepting and dealing with failure. Successful athletes use the right mental tools to make the necessary adjustments while those who don't know how to do that struggle and don't rise up the levels of competition as fast as they would like, or not at all.
I'll give the final word to Michael Jung, a two time Olympic gold medallist in eventing. "I fell off my horse 1,000 times and learned from each one.". If that kind of failure leads to that kind of success perhaps we should take note and fail a little better when the next opportunity arises.