Why the pentathlon violates the dignity of horses

opinion

Nobody wants to see these pictures, nowhere and certainly not at the Olympics: Instead of galloping over the obstacles, the horse runs backwards and tries to climb, on top of that the German pentathlete Annika Schleu, who is written in despair, and her horse with her Spurs and whip beaten to make it jump. On the side the trainer Kim Raisner, who also yells: “Hit it right” and tries to push the horse with her fist. Vain. That’s the only good news of the day: horses have to jump voluntarily. If they don’t want to, a person, whether in the saddle or on the ground, is powerless.

Saint Boy, that’s the name of the brown, of all people, doesn’t take part in the people’s game because it becomes too much for him, because his nerves are at the end, because the atmosphere under the floodlights makes him nervous or because he just doesn’t feel like it. Who looks into such a horse’s soul? During the demonstration, he proved that he can jump the course with obstacles of 1.20 meters. The owners of the horses that are raffled in the pentathlon must first ride the course themselves to show that the horse is up to the task. Every horse goes twice, even under the first rider, a Russian, Saint Boy was eliminated after three refusals. Only after four refusals could Schleu have insisted on a replacement horse. So she just has Lospech and loses the possible gold medal, falls back to 31st place. There are many losers in the women’s pentathlon that evening at Tokyo Stadium. Not only Annika Schleu, but also the national coach Kim Raisner, who obviously didn’t think for a second about how her behavior would come across in the world, but above all Saint Boy, beaten, frustrated and scared. Raisner has since been suspended from all duties in Tokyo.

In pentathlon horses are degraded to sports equipment

Riding has long been the Achilles’ heel of pentathlon. Running, shooting, fencing, swimming – these are all disciplines in which time, points and mistakes are measured objectively. Riding an obstacle course on a drawn horse after just 20 minutes of getting used to it is a Vabanque game. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and that doesn’t necessarily depend on the riding skills of the athletes, which, however, are often not very far off. Equestrian sport means the joint performance of rider and horse, based on trust and training. This is the essence of sport and should apply wherever horses are used in competition.

In pentathlon horses are degraded to sports equipment, like the laser pistol in shooting and the rapier in fencing. They don’t deserve it, it hurts their dignity. Therefore, riding should disappear from the modern pentathlon as quickly as possible, even if it was the Olympic forefather Baron de Coubertin himself who invented the pentathlon in its current form. Other things have changed since then. You can replace horse riding with BMX biking or wall climbing. It doesn’t hurt anyone, success doesn’t depend on the luck of the draw and nobody gets beaten up. If that’s the Tokyo lesson, that would be the second piece of good news.