Source: ESPN
Animal advocacy group, People for Ethical Treatment towards Animals (PETA), is seeking to continue its campaign for all equine events to be taken off Olympic Games in the future. Senior vice president Kathy Guillermo, who had written to IOC in August for the scrapping of horse riding in pentathlon, believes that equestrian events too must go. Horse riding is already on course to being replaced by cycling in modern Pentathlon after Paris 2024.
“We’ll be urging our 9 million supporters and many others who agree with us to tell IOC what is obvious to everyone: The Olympic Games should be modernized to include only willing participants,” Guillermo tells ESPN, “Competitions involving animals must end and this means horses, who don’t care at all about medals, should be left out.”
Equestrian rider Fouaad Mirza, who’d represented India at this year’s Olympics, finds the rationale unwarranted. He offers that there’s always going to be a case both for and against the sport depending on how one views involving animals in competition. “Ours is perhaps the only sport in the world where men and women compete on equal terms and which involves a human and animal partnership. In terms of Olympic values, it ticks all the boxes of sport, courage, compassion and team work. One needs only to walk amongst the stables to see how much care competitors take of their horses and how devoted we are towards them. Horses are an extension of our families.”
Unlike riding in Pentathlon, where horses and riders are randomly paired with each other 20 minutes before they enter the course, equestrian is built around partnership between rider and mount, choreographed to move harmoniously to invisible aids. Kathy argues that familiarity between man and animal doesn’t necessarily acquit the sport. “Riding in pentathlon is of course particularly cruel, pairing a human and horse who’ve never met. But in all equestrian events, the horses have no power,” she adds, “Agreed, the horses and humans have a level of familiarity in equestrian. But make no mistake, horses learn early on that they must submit – no matter how they are feeling. It’s a relationship involving dominance. Horses may be less tense when they know the rider, but they are no less exploited or endangered.”
As a sport, equestrian is seen as freakishly expensive and overwhelmingly white, and descriptors such as ‘breaking a horse’ – preparing it for riding, haltering and following basic commands, don’t help either. “I hate that term and wish we didn’t call it that,” says Olympian Imtiaz Aneez, who runs a boutique stable and residential riding school in coastal Gujarat, “But to the argument of horses being forced in any manner, whether it’s for dressage or show jumping, I’d say when horses compete at the elite level, it has to be willingness. It can’t be coercion. Horses are tested often so you can’t get away with using needles or painkillers. At our facility, we give them alternate therapy, rest, bandage, multani mitti (fuller’s earth) and the strongest medication we use is doses of homeopathic Arnica or Calendula. I wish those criticizing our sport would look at the amount of care and money we devote toward our horses’ recovery, whether it’s removing lactic acid from their body or loading them on electrolytes. At the cost of sounding pompous, our horses are well-tended to than a lot of human athletes.”
Equestrian at the Olympics comprises three disciplines – show jumping, eventing and dressage. Ahead of the 2012 Games in London, there was a furore over an alleged video of Swedish rider Patrick Kittel using rollkur – drawing the neck round in a deep curve so nose almost touches its chest – on his dressage horse. Kittel would later deny any such occurrence. Dressage, essentially horse ballet, has the animals side-stepping, pirouetting and performing extended trots to music. Aneez offers that it helps horses “stay supple and sound”. Many outside the sport view it as an unnecessary and somewhat ironic routine to put a free-spirited animal through rehearsed choreography.
In recent years, IOC has been trying to address the Olympics’ young-people problem – making itself more appealing to millennial and Gen Z audience. In Tokyo, surfing, sport climbing, 3×3 basketball and Freestyle BMX made their introductory appearance. Paris 2024 will welcome breakdancing into its roster and E-sports will feature as a demonstration event for the first time. This year, IOC directed world equestrian body, FEI, to trim down its participant number and reduce team jumping to a three-person team, instead of four. “Like all sports in the Olympic movement, we received a clear message from the IOC president – ‘change or be changed’ – inviting the Olympic sports to make their events at the Olympic Games more universal, more exciting, easier to understand and more attractive, particularly for new young audiences,” FEI had said.
Kathy insists the core issue is about the practice of the sport itself, not specifically the Olympics but events at other levels too. What put these events on their radar, she explains, was an incident involving a show jumper earlier this year. She received a video revealing abusive whipping in a California show ring by a rider named Kevin Lemke. “We lodged complaints with both the FEI and the US Equestrian Federation (USEF). In response, the USEF suspended Lemke for four months and fined him $4,000. As Lemke was no longer registered with the FEI, that body could not take action. While we knew these events could be dangerous, this year we decided we could not ignore what can only be called abuse.”
Aneez counters the argument of possible harsh training methods and unnatural routines and cites that almost all riders at the elite levels of the sport are animal lovers. The evolution of the sport and medical science he points out implies that injured horses aren’t not put down anymore, instead they can even return to complete fitness and competition. “When we don’t agree with something, doing away with it can seem like the easy choice. But that’s hardly ever a solution. The tough yet sustainable option is to educate those within the sport. I’ve been around horses since I was four, grew up bathing, grooming, feeding and brushing them and today I teach those training at my facility to do the same. It can go a long way.”
Kathy is bracing for a long campaign. “How far we go depends on what happens. But we’re watching. We’re also receiving complaints from those inside equestrian world who are deeply troubled by what they see. Those involved in equestrian events may wish to rethink their future plans.”
