![\"Print\"](\"http:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/SHOCK-HORROR.jpg\")
It seems to me that right now the FEI is following a policy that will lead to the destruction of equestrian sport. Previously the argument for keeping equestrian in the Olympic movement was that equestrian attracted the most royals of any sport, and the tiaras added lustre to the event. It may have been excruciatingly cringe-worthy, but at least \u2013 dependent on the fertility rates of the various royal houses of Europe \u2013 it had a chance of success.<\/p>\n
Now the FEI General Secretary is vigorously following the line that for the sport to stay in the Olympic Games it must be re-shaped so that it becomes attractive to spectators \u2013 read: a couple of billion Chinese television viewers. And no matter how you dumb eventing and dressage down, this is just not going to happen (I did facetiously suggest that if we returned to the origins of classical dressage, ie. Xenophon\u2019s schedule for training warriors, and put a couple of teams into the ring to battle to the death, THAT would out rate Game of Thrones\u2026)<\/p>\n
I think it is highly possible that the sport of showjumping, now that it has been substantially re-shaped by a couple of mega dealers looking to the emerging markets, could easily capture the Chinese audience, once they spend enough money with Messrs Tops and Schockem\u00f6hle, to buy horses so talented that they can ride around today\u2019s courses (all devoid of those frightening natural obstacles that used to make shows like Aachen and Dublin so exciting) despite the rider. But dressage and eventing, no way.<\/p>\n
Even in Australia, when we had won three gold medals in a row, eventing battled to attract a crowd. Sure you can dumb it down and put on something called Express Eventing, but in the highly unlikely event that any of the spectators at Equitana or one of the Royal Shows, decided to follow up Express with the real thing, they would be bitterly disappointed because the real thing takes so long and is so difficult to follow (who\u2019s winning now Daddy??) <\/em>and you end up so far from the fast food outlets.<\/p>\n The reality is that in our country at least, Eventing is a participatory sport not a spectator sport. It is perhaps all irrelevant since if the IOC and the FEI insist on including more teams in Eventing at the Games, the subsequent carnage will kill the sport. It has happened before \u2013 at Sydney 2000 we had a wonderful classic teams event, with no bad pictures but we were forced by the IOC to run the separate individual event, in which a series of individuals from countries who did not have the experience or expertise to mount a team, tried to kill themselves and their horses, producing news coverage that saw Eventing removed from the program of the Beijing Games, only to be reinstated when the then chair of the Eventing Sub-Committee, Wayne Roycroft boldly came up with the present, no steeple etc, format.<\/p>\n I note that the Australian delegate to the recent FEI conference, Judy Fasher made this point to the Assembly \u2013 that I guess is the first time in a decade that an Australian delegate has contributed meaningfully to the discussion.<\/p>\n And no matter how you mangle dressage it will always be, as laconic Australian sports commentator H G Nelson described it at Sydney \u2013 \u2018that sport where it takes six minutes to park a horse\u2026\u2019 Sure you can get the general public to watch an edited highlights package, but you are crazy if you think those billions of Chinese are about to tune in to a day of dressage tests, even if Mr Schockem\u00f6hle can find horses for Team China.<\/p>\n The question is, if we are going to be forced out of the Games by Golf or Cage Fighting or whatever, do we go proudly, showcasing events that share a couple of hundred years of horsemanship, or do we go out with a whimper having put on a series of parodies of the real thing?<\/p>\n – CH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It seems to me that right now the FEI is following a policy that will lead to the destruction of equestrian sport. Previously the argument for keeping equestrian in the Olympic movement was that equestrian attracted the most royals of any sport, and the tiaras added lustre to the event. It may have been excruciatingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,1],"tags":[1466,1465,429,424],"class_list":["post-26642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-uncategorized","tag-changes-to-eventing","tag-equestrian-sport","tag-fei","tag-olympic-games"],"acf":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26642"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32372,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26642\/revisions\/32372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}