07/08/2024
I'm not picking on Dressage by sharing this. However, what I am advocating for is we MUST do better for our horses - no matter what discipline or level you ride at! The FEI is supposed to be the pinnacle governing body over all equestrian sport and yet they are wishy washy on actually walking the walk, when it really counts.
We can debate all day on whether or not something is abusive but if it is spelled out in black and white and all riders have to follow said black and white "rules", then there is no other action than elimination.
They did it for blood on a leg for one rider, yet visible blue tongues get a "talking to"???
Good news/bad news y'all. The wine has been opened. Let's talk about the Equestrian Olympics. time.
First, at the risk of beating a dead horse (I feel like in the current climate I have to specify *NOT LITERALLY*) I'm not sure there's a lot that I can add to the discourse.
Let's start with some positives. The caliber of horse on display in all three disciplines was simply outstanding. The breeders have clearly done their work, and are creating fantastic athletes with varied bloodlines and histories. There were a few highlights for me in the riding - Michael Jung is so precise in everything he does. Justina Vangaite has an amazing, inspiring story, and clearly has an undeniable partnership with her horse. Henrik von Eckermann, despite actually falling in his individual ride, and the unbelievable King Edward overcame a lost shoe and a broken martingale and still completed two clear rounds. Pauline Basquin, a rider from the Cadre Noir at Saumur, showed us Dressage that was elegant, flowing and with stylized but natural gaits. She gave me some hope.
Now, on to the inevitable despair. From my home country we saw several athletes across disciplines who attended the games with recently purchased horses. These partnerships looked anything but concrete, and the tension on display was frankly embarrassing. Why in the wealthiest nation in the world, are we unable to afford good enough EDUCATION to actually produce our own top level horses? If this Olympics taught team USA anything I hope it's that we need to develop young riders, but more importantly trainers, to produce the level and quality of horses here at home. We cannot rely on buying our wins, regardless of how talented and shining some of the horses are. (And, I should add, this is not just the US, nor is it *all* of the US riders, but we see it in fledgling, wealthy, emerging equestrian countries as well like the UAE, for example).
As anyone who follows Dressage and hasn't been living under a rock will know, just days before the games Charlotte DuJardin was torpedoed by a several years-old video showing her beating a horse with a whip, where she can be heard to say, "This whip is so sh*t at hitting them hard." flippantly, like she'd done it 1000 times before. She was basically drawn and quartered, abandoned even by her longtime mentor Carl Hester who claimed he had *never* seen this side of her before - this from the man who gave her the nickname Edwina after Edward Scissorhands. And so after her "voluntary" step down from the games, business continued as usual.
Despite Charlotte's public shaming, some of those doing the shaming competed on horses with blue tongues in the run up to the games - including Isabel Werth, Lottie Fry and Patrik Kittel. And now .tv is sharing that the veterinary team onsite reviewed images from the Dressage competition, and found several riders to have performed in the Olympics on horses with blue tongues, including now silver medalist Werth and top 10 finisher Kittel. BUT, despite this intervention, no change in the standings will take place, and no suspensions, even though this is a clear violation of the FEI's own purported welfare policies. They had a meeting with the riders to "warn" them of future suspensions...if you can do this in the Olympics on the world stage, when all eyes are on you, how can we possibly expect there to be repercussions on the more local level, when the biggest names and deepest pockets have almost unchecked influence?
Though I am more able to forgive the extreme bitting and harsh spurs in jumping, at least they were willing to ring out riders who were putting themselves and their mounts in danger. In Dressage, even what was awarded top honors was pretty questionable.
Beyond Werth and Kittel's blue tongues, there were quite a few broken gaits, trailing hind ends, lateralized walks. Individual gold medalist, Jessica von Bredow-Werndl who is generally one of the softer riders, showed a passage toward the end of her individual test that lost all semblance of 2 beat rhythm/diagonalization - it was as if the hind end was performing 1 tempis while the front was still in passage. This level of disunited movement from front to back would, in a normal horse, indicate severe neurological issues. Steffen Peters and Mopsie (Suppenkasper) were eliminated from individual competition when, in the qualifier, he was supposed to perform piaffe he performed something closer to a sideways moving 3 legged jambette/canter. I was honestly worried his horse had been grievously injured. We saw plenty of behind the vertical hyperflexion, and at least one instance of absolute elevation from Helix and Adrienne Lyle.
And yet, even when the ground jury vets intervene (albeit after the fact) nothing changes? We are supposed to accept all of this as normal?? The "moment in time" argument falls away when we all are watching the same livestream...
Honestly, the emperor has no clothes. We will not be gaslit into normalizing what we saw on display there. It is obvious that the FEI is totally incapable of separating itself from the riders and judges it's supposed to be regulating, playing favorites and throwing others under the bus as it sees fit - to the wolves at PETA. It offers the lip service of the theme of this Olympic games "A bond like no other" but doesn't actually support that goal. Give me all the cooling tents and matted boxes you like, but if you aren't willing to go to bat and take medals away when riders have ridden with hands so harsh as to remove the blood supply to the tongue, I'm sorry, what is your purpose?!
At the end of the day, we are going to have to change this ourselves. We are going to have to keep shaking the saber, publishing photos, and writing articles. We are going to have to demonstrate and teach proper contact, kind, ethical, educated training. We are going to have to be the change. No one is coming to save horse sports. We have to do it ourselves, or languish in the demise of what we once loved. The time is now.
Edited to add an article published on Reuters with quotes from the head vet: https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/equestrian-governing-body-finds-blue-horse-tongues-dressage-review-2024-08-06/
(enjoy this image of a nice piaffe from Pauline in the warm-up at Paris, to feel a little better about the state of things, photo credit to Cheval Magazine )
