The Palace of Versailles should have been a fitting and opulent backdrop for the Paris Olympics’ equestrian events: gleaming horses, elegant riders attired in Hermès and Gucci, and horsemanship skills dating back to the Renaissance.
Indeed, the sport is awash with present-day Sun Kings, including the daughters of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bruce Springsteen. Actual British royals have provided two Olympians—King Charles’s sister, Princess Anne, and her daughter, Zara Tindall—and members of the ruling families of Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have show jumped at the Sydney, London, Rio, and Tokyo Olympics. Other extremely high-net-worth individuals—such as Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein—are often involved as owners of the horses.
But all that glistens is far from gold. On July 23, a leaked video showed Great Britain’s triple Olympic dressage champion, Charlotte Dujardin, whipping the horse of a teenage student 24 times. She used a thin, flexible, and sharp lunge whip—which is meant only to guide a horse, not to punish it—and her actions were astonishing and egregious to any knowledgeable horse person.
Fellow riders on the board of the International Dressage Riders Club said they “universally condemned” her behavior, before adding, “Ms Dujardin has stated she has no excuse for her actions and has also expressed her shame and regret.” But the sport’s dark underbelly was exposed with such rawness that it is still creating headlines in the British press, 10 days into its worst-ever reputational crisis.
Dujardin’s immediate apology and withdrawal from the British team, plus suspension by the sport’s governing body, the Fédération Equestre Internationale (F.E.I.), cut no ice, and sponsors immediately began to drop her.
Fans felt ill-used, too. Dujardin, 39, was not born to wealth—she trained after school in the headlights of her mother’s car—and was supposedly the poster girl of sympathetic riding. She was perceived as the antidote to the controversial “rollkur” training technique—in which a horse’s head is forcibly wound in to its chest, turning the tongue blue and affecting locomotion, in order to encourage the preferred posture. The technique was banned in competition in 2010 but is still widely practiced. If Dujardin was lashing a horse, what else was going on?
This has been the worst setback for horse sport I can recall in my 40 years in the industry. The damage is seemingly irreparable, despite a joyful and controversy-free Paris eventing competition earlier this week.
Dujardin’s actions were astonishing and egregious to any knowledgeable horse person.
Money and horse abuse have always coexisted. For every rider with the skill, time, and patience to train horses correctly and kindly, there will be another willing to pay for the finished article. Some horses in this week’s show-jumping events have changed hands for millions of dollars.
Incentives to cut corners are therefore huge. Horse-dealer tricks used in the past included “rapping,” hitting the horse’s legs as it jumps, to lift them higher; lining “protective” boots with nails or even hedgehog skins, which jab the horse’s legs if they touch a pole, forcing the horse to jump cleaner the next time; constraining a horse using a gadget called “draw reins,” to tie the horse into the desired, rounded dressage posture; and routine use of the now banned painkiller phenylbutazone, to mask smaller injuries that would otherwise stop the horse from participating.
Nowadays, the unscrupulous are more sophisticated: cleverly engineered “pinch” boots, which pinch a horse’s legs to get it to lift them higher; injections of undetectable potions to de-sensitize lower limbs or immobilize a swishing tail, which signals stress. Even grocery-store marshmallow fluff is used to masquerade as the natural white foam a relaxed horse produces, when in fact the horse is fighting against the steering hardware known as the “bit.”
The F.E.I. could never have imagined that a likely act of personal revenge by a whistleblower would sabotage its welfare narrative on the eve of the Paris Games. Following the release of the Dujardin video, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) demanded the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) drop all three horse sports—jumping, dressage, and eventing. The F.E.I. suffered further humiliation last Saturday when PETA spotted rollkur being used during an Olympic training session.
Horse sport has actually been on the I.O.C. “at risk” list for more than a decade. The F.E.I. already accepted compromises—shorter formats, smaller teams—to be included at the Games in Tokyo, Paris, and Los Angeles. Even in 1992, in Barcelona, I.O.C. vice president Dick Pound was briefing the media that he wanted horses out, because of elitism and expense.
The F.E.I. has tended to address this issue with broad brushstrokes. Following the furor over the punching of a horse by a German coach during the modern pentathlon (which is not governed by the F.E.I.) at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the F.E.I. launched an independent ethics commission and sent out a pre-Paris message, reminding riders they are “guardians” of their horses. But, inexplicably, it balks at enforcing horse welfare on the field of play or—until Dujardin—at making an example of offenders.
Last November, a Danish investigation exposed abusive practices at the barn of the Danish dressage rider Andreas Helgstrand, who is reportedly a multi-millionaire from his transatlantic horse-dealing business. Yet Helgstrand’s F.E.I. suspension, pending further investigation, was not imposed until April of this year, and without fanfare. Many outside Denmark just stumbled upon the news when going through the F.E.I.’s database of riders. This week, F.E.I. president Ingmar De Vos wearily told the world’s press, “We understand that words carry weight only when they are supported by meaningful action.”
Senior figures in the sport rarely address horse abuse in public. It was a coup when Christine Stückelberger, the dressage champion from the Montreal 1976 Olympics, called out rollkur at an activists’ conference in April of this year. Close to tears, she said the “sad eyes” of horses says it all. “This is terrible abuse.... We are looking on and saying nothing.”
Meanwhile, in Britain, there has been an outpouring of sympathy for Carl Hester, Dujardin’s mentor and teammate at the Olympics, who has had to bury feelings of betrayal and concentrate on captaining the team.
After his dressage test on Tuesday, Hester observed, “The last few days, we’ve seen amazing sport, we’ve seen the care everyone’s giving, the grooms that work here are incredibly hardworking, how they love and look after the horses. And I hope that really starts to show.” But will it be enough to keep equestrianism in the Olympics?
Pippa Cuckson is the former deputy editor of Horse & Hound and the former equestrian correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. She has received the Bureau Award from the International Alliance of Equestrian Journalists for her outstanding contribution to journalism
