By Tassilo Hummel
VERSAILLES (Reuters) -The video footage that led to six-times Olympic medallist Charlotte Dujardin pulling out of the Paris Games shows her whipping a horse’s legs multiple times, sparking a broader debate about equestrian sports.
The International Equestrian Federation (FEI) had suspended Dujardin on Tuesday over inappropriate training methods.
“What is shown in this video is first of all completely unacceptable at any point, any time in a horse’s training”, FEI veterinarian director Goran Akerstrom told Reuters on Wednesday.
“You can certainly see that some of the whiplashes did hit the horse and the horse was stressed with it”, he said, describing the whiplashes as “stupid” for the horse’s learning process.
The FEI brutally woke up to the challenge of improving horse welfare after the Tokyo Olympics severely harmed its image.
In 2021, one horse died in a cross-country accident while another one suffered from severe nose bleeding from jumping and spectators were shocked by scenes of abuse in a modern pentathlon competition.
FEI chief veterinarian Akerstrom said the FEI recently released an action plan with 37 measures to protect horses, including rules for the tightness of nosebands and flexible cross-country obstacles designed to prevent severe accidents.
Earlier this year, the body had suspended Colombian dressage competitor Cesar Parra over videos showing alleged animal abuse.
Denmark’s national equestrian body this month announced disciplinary proceedings against Carina Cassoe Kruth following similar allegations, local media reported.
The Dujardin video, which was aired on the Good Morning Britain news programme on Wednesday, puts the sport under the spotlight again.
“It’s necessary that we have a change and the actions that we are taking will lead to that change”, Akerstrom said.
Meanwhile, eventing horses arrived at the Versailles chateau on Wednesday morning for Olympic equestrian competitions which are meant to set new standards for horse welfare.
The stakes are high. Animal rights organisation PETA renewed its call for equestrian events to be banned from the Olympics.
“The message to the International Olympic Committee should be clear by now: Remove equestrian events from the Olympic Games,” PETA said in a statement.
In its final report published last year, the FEI’s Equine Ethics & Wellbeing Commission stated “there is a risk that a single incident covered by the media could have disastrous consequences for the future of horse sport”.
SERIOUS CONCERNS
The FEI has launched an investigation in Dujardin’s case. Officials of the body in Versailles and the British equestrian team declined to make any further comments, citing the ongoing probe.
UK Sport, the government agency responsible for investing in Olympic and Paralympic sport in Britain, said Dujardin’s eligibility to receive public funding and access to publicly funded benefits had been suspended, pending the outcome of the FEI’s probe.
“We are disturbed by the serious concerns that have been raised in the past 24 hours regarding horse welfare and Charlotte Dujardin,” it said in a statement.
She will be replaced by Becky Moody, who is set to make her Olympic debut on her bay gelding Jagerbomb, Team GB said in a statement. Andrew Gould, on Indigro, will be the team’s new fallback option.
Meanwhile in Versailles, horses from 28 nations, including Australia, Britain, China and Australia – some of them worth more than one million euros ($1.08 million) – passed the compound’s gates from dawn, where they received final medical checks.
They were brought into climate-regulated stables with extra large boxes and round-the-clock surveillance as the sport’s governing body seeks to display its efforts to put animal welfare first.
The FEI also appointed a dedicated “Horse Welfare Coordinator” for the first time, leading a team of stewards that monitor every horses movements throughout the Games, including at night.
“My job is to be strict,” said Richard Corde, the retired French veterinarian who was appointed for the job. “We will make sure that the horse is always in the most comfortable conditions, that there are no constraints and that there are no abnormal movements.”
ERROR OF JUDGEMENT
Dujardin said in a video statement announcing her Olympic withdrawal on Instagram on Tuesday that footage showed her making an error of judgement that was out of character and did not reflect how she trained her horses or coached her pupils.
“Yet again, an Olympic rider has been caught on video abusing a horse to force the animal to behave in an entirely unnatural way, simply for her own glory”, campaign group PETA said.
Dujardin won three golds, a silver and two bronze medals at the London, Rio and Tokyo Games in individual and team dressage.
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(Reporting by Simon Jennings and Alan Baldwin; Additional reporting by Tassilo Hummel, Editing by Ingrid Melander, Christian Radnedge and Pritha Sarkar)
