SHOW JUMPING: JOHNNY WATTERSONlooks back at the recent history of showjumping to find out why the sport's credibility is at such a low ebb
WHEN CIAN O’Connor’s Waterford Crystal tested positive in 2004 for a human psychotropic drug it seemed like a bit of a lark until the Irishman was stripped of his Olympic gold medal.
Brazilian rider Rodrigo Pessoa stepped up as the Olympic champion.
Four years later Pessoa, one of the top riders in the world, travelled to the Olympics in Hong Kong where his horse Rufus tested positive for the banned substance.
The gold medallist from Athens was disqualified.
The 2008 Olympics came and left with the governing body, the Federation Equestre Internationale (FEI), announcing that six Olympic horses had been disqualified, four for capsaicin, a chilli derivative with pain relieving properties that is known to make a horses leg sensitive; one for the pain-relieving medication Nonivamide; and one for Felbinac, an anti-inflammatory medication. Among those was Denis Lynch’s Lantinus.
In the intervening years Jessica Kuerten’s Castle Forbes Maike also fell foul of the testers (Extoricocib) following her win in La Baule in 2007.
In September 2011 Billy Twomey’s Ramanov and Lynch’s All Inclusive NWR were disqualified from the Global Champions Tour in Rio following hypersensitive tests to the horse’s legs.
That was to be one of the three tests that Lynch’s horses failed over the last 12 months.
Corkman Twomey immediately explained that a cut sustained by the horse while travelling had become infected and sensitive to touch but that “he was fine to jump”.
Officials did not agree and after thermography testing, the horse was removed. Twomey has been named along with O’Connor to represent Ireland in London 2012.
“Look at Pessoa. They all run into problems,” said one Irish rider who did not want to be identified.
“They have all run into problems with drugs. Look at Michael Whitaker, he mixed up feeds and they tried to ban him for six months. It could happen to anybody.”
Whitaker’s stallion Thackery tested positive for Altrenogest (behavioural modification) in 2009 and he was banned for four months. The British rider argued a number of things: that Regumate had been accidentally given via a feed container normally used for his mare Portofino; that the samples had been contaminated; and that Altrenogest was “misclassified” on the prohibited substances list. All three defences were rejected.
The recent buzz word has been hypersensitivity. If a horse’s leg is hypersensitive it tends to want to raise it higher when jumping to ensure it does not hit the pole and feel pain. It can occur naturally as well as by the application of banned products such as capsaicin.
Lynch’s three recent disqualifications have been for hypersensitivity. A deliberate effort to hypersensitise a horse’s leg could be seen as cruel. But no cases of intentionally causing the condition have ever been proven against riders.
For the failed tests of Twomey and Lynch in Rio the FEI went to the effort of announcing that there was “no indication of malpractice”.
Grand, ride on.
In Beijing the cases of the hypersensitive horses were said to have happened by accident. The horses were disqualified on the grounds of welfare, but nothing was proven against the riders.
Grand, ride on.
When Lynch’s horse Lantinus was last disqualified in Aachen, he threw his leg over a different horse and was allowed to continue.
Ride on.
When O’Connor lost his Olympic gold medal he was banned for three months. Lynch also received three months for the capsaicin found in the sample provided by Lantinus in 2008.
When Michelle Smith de Bruin was judged to have adulterated her urine sample with whisky, she was banned for four years and it ended her swimming career.
Disquieting, bemusing and all just breathtakingly lenient. A less sympathetic amateur rider compared the failed tests to the way cycling used to be, a peleton of international events in which the horses have to perform with the added benefit that the better they do the more they are worth.
“They should have put in an Eddie the Eagle figure instead of Cian O’Connor,” said a horse owner in Wicklow. “Look at the optics of what they have done. This isn’t just an Olympic sport but it is an important Irish industry as well. The thing is though everyone is doing it.”
The Irish Sport Horse Breeding Policy 2010-15 puts the industry worth at €400 million a year. It provides employment for 20,000 individuals. There are 12,000 breeders listed on the Irish Horse Register. Of those 13 per cent aim to produce horses for export and 70 per cent hope to breed quality showjumpers. In 2005 about 44 per cent of horses sold privately and 61 per cent of horses sold at auction were sold to international markets with the UK the biggest one for Ireland.
Our largest overseas market may well be laughing now. O’Connor, disqualified in 2004, replaces Lynch, who was disqualified in 2008 to represent Ireland in 2012. There has been muted outcry this time, possibly in the understanding that O’Connor has served his time over the last eight years. But following the expulsion of Lantinus four years ago the reaction was strident.
Olivia Mitchell was the then Fine Gael spokeswoman on sport. She observed that the latest development surrounding Lynch and Lantinus would cause “dismay” among the Irish public.
“Considering all the expertise available and Ireland’s loss of a medal at the last Olympics [Athens] due to drugs offences, it begs the question how could this happen again?” she asked.
The Olympic Council of Ireland president, Pat Hickey, said at the time that the sport was now “in the red zone” with regard to its future inclusion in Olympic Games. Hickey, who is also president of the European Olympic Committees, a powerful voting block including all of the European nations, added that there were fundamental issues that the sport had yet to iron out.
“There are a lot of problems occurring. I’m in no doubt,” he said. “I’m appalled that this is happening in this sport. But there seems to be something wrong in the equestrian movement and they just have to get their act together.”
The OCI and Horse Sport Ireland may have mended fences since then but Hickey’s words ring true now. The showjumping world, a clubby circuit that travels the world, appears to haplessly fall into an Olympic Games every four years where it buckles under the closer scrutiny.
The FEI’s reaction is to kick the medal winners off the podium but provide the cushion of a soft three-month landing. You might wonder then where the moral authority and the leadership have gone and why the lack of tighter control over competitions continues.
Here in Ireland we take our cues well from the international overlords with the past two weeks providing the third part of an Irish showjumping trilogy. Two embarrassing Olympic Games and a selectorial quagmire.
The unease surrounding Ireland’s picking of Lynch for the Olympic place after two recent disqualifications and then dumping him after three disqualifications fits into that sense of disjointed thinking and describes a strangely passive attitude towards infringements.
The result of that is that O’Connor, the person at the centre of the most notorious case of equine doping ever to hit the Olympics, has been rewarded. Even that episode was absurdly coloured by the heist of the year when the urine sample of Waterford Crystal was stolen and the offices of the Equestrian Federation of Ireland were broken into with files relating to the horse faxed to the RTÉ. Neither incident was solved by the British police or Gardaí.
Prior to Waterford Crystal O’Connor also rode a horse called ABC Landliebe that had failed a doping test earlier in 2004 at a competition in Rome.
“A lot of the time the groom does it, mixes up the feed,” said an Irish showjumper, who does not live in Ireland. “If you are going to Italy for a show and you stop in France and your horse eats out of the same bin as the horse that was there before what can you do?”
In 1998 US sprinter Denis Mitchell failed a drugs test with elevated levels of testosterone and claimed that five beers and sex four times with his wife the previous night was responsible. What could he do? The US Track and Field Association magically cleared him.
Now fevered sex has become animal feed, five beers the night before a test is the wrong bin and a contaminated nutritional supplement is the illegal ointment rubbed into a tired horse’s leg.
Last year British Showjumping (BS) reassured members that spot checks for drugs were taking place at national competitions under the new British Equestrian Federation anti-doping rules.
The announcement came after a group of BS members began a leaflet campaign, complaining that misuse of drugs is rife.
Why would they be thinking that? The sport speaks big about dope testing and animal welfare but the deterrents are not big, not at all.
Pessosa was given a four and a half months ban and a €1,200 fine for his 2008 Olympic disqualification as “bad stable management” was responsible for Nonivamide creeping into his horses system.
The sport speaks an evasive language, where the idea of strict liability for the horse is anathema. They talk of a condition called hypersensitivity that may or may not be caused deliberately. The solution is to give the rider the benefit of the doubt.
It’s the language of track sprinters and cyclists from a different era, the language that beat everyone down time and time again and finally taught sports fans to become cynics.
In all of these issues there is a question of faith and sport now has to prove its worth before people believe in it. Having betrayed the public in two Olympic Games the last few weeks has illustrated that showjumping has not yet gotten to the point where they can even ask for that belief.
“The recent buzz word has been hypersensitivity. If a horse’s leg is hypersensitive it tends to want to raise it higher when jumping to ensure it does not hit the pole and feel pain. It can occur naturally as well as by the application of banned products
