The weather delays and changes to the schedule at the recent Asian Games left me reminiscing about the 2018 World Equestrian Games in Tryon, when Hurricane Florence pushed the eventing showjumping back from Sunday to Monday.
“We have no intention of cancelling – we’re going to finish this thing,” said the event’s discipline director Jim Wolf at the press conference after cross-country.
At the Asian Games in Tokyo – on the site where everything except cross-country happened at the Olympics in 2021 – a similarly determined attitude prevailed in the face of Typhoon Dujuan.
The original three-day schedule (with dressage, cross-country and showjumping in that order) ended up compressed, with dressage and showjumping on one day, then cross-country on the second.
Inter-discipline joshing is a healthy part of being an H&H section editor, but, “You had a team and an individual competition, I don’t know what you’re complaining about” didn’t go down well with our dressage editor when the hurricane also knocked out that sport’s showcase, the freestyle, at that 2018 worlds.
The joke was that only Charlotte Dujardin rode freestyle... Mount St John Freestyle.
On a serious note, I do always wonder whether it makes sense of award two sets of individual medals at dressage championships.
Currently, Lottie Fry is the undisputed world champion and Justin Verboomen the single European champion, both having won both the special and freestyle golds. But this isn’t always the case and I can’t help thinking that having a “special world champion” and a “freestyle world champion” doesn’t help make our sport easy for outsiders to understand.
My personal preference would be for dressage always to count the special for the team medals, as well as the grand prix – it would make more of the team competition to have two tests involved – and keep the freestyle as the single individual showdown.
Two individual showjumping champions
At the Asian Games, having double individual title holders goes to a whole new level in the showjumping, where riders can choose between 1.45m and 1.55m competitions and there is a set of medals for each. I understand the FEI wants to increase the number of nations who can contest championships, but this feels like an odd solution.
Surely a normal multi-stage championship, with increasing difficulty and decreasing number of competitors through the rounds, does the job?
It’s also fascinating that at the Asian Games, those competing only as individuals in the showjumping don’t jump the team round before the individual contest.
At other championships, the team acts as a qualifier for the individual, so everyone jumps it. For some horses, it would be an advantage not to tire them, for others, a disadvantage that they haven’t had the opportunity to experience the ring, but either way, it doesn’t feel like a level playing field.
Whose bronze medal?
But the one aspect of the Asian Games I was truly horrified to hear about was that if one nation has a clean sweep of the individual podium in eventing, the person who finishes third yields the bronze medal to the fourth-placed person from another nation.
This is because across the whole Asian Games, each nation can only field two athletes in an individual competition. Obviously in eventing, team and individual run concurrently, so it’s impossible for all team members not to be in the individual competition, but having to give up a medal in that scenario to follow the principle feels outrageous.
As a final, light-hearted, personal link between this Asian Games and that 2018 World Championships, it was only on publication of my report from Tryon that I discovered that China’s Alex Hua Tian – who successfully defended his individual eventing gold at this Asian Games – had described his ride Ballytiglea Vivendi as a “warrior”... but I had heard, and so written, “worrier”.
Fortunately Alex and I have known each other since I was 18 and he was 10, and he and the horse’s owners, Bianca Mortimer and the late John Lewis, thought it was funny – apparently “Boris” would have been very annoyed to be described as a worrier! Congratulations to Alex and sorry, again, to Boris.
● Should championships allow two sets of individual medals? Let us know your thoughts at hhletters@futurenet.com, including your name, nearest town and county, for the chance to have your thoughts published in a future issue of Horse & Hound magazine
- For more exclusive insights and analysis from top names in the equestrian world, subscribe to the Horse & Hound website