To the untrained eye, the video showing Charlotte Dujardin forcefully and repeatedly whipping a horse has arrived like a bolt from a clear blue Parisian sky. And yet the scandal engulfing Britain’s three-time Olympic champion is but the latest horror for equestrianism as it lurches from one lurid nightmare to the next. Quite simply, it is a sport under siege. Earlier this month, there was the ugly headline that Carina Cassoe Kruth, a Danish rider, had withdrawn from the Games because of footage allegedly showing her training a horse in an unacceptably rough manner. Now that the very same charge is levelled at the most famous face in dressage, leaving her “deeply ashamed”, its very existence in the Olympic programme is in peril.
Should a half-tonne animal still be forced to dance? That is the fundamental question for anyone recoiling at the sight of Dujardin striking the horse over and over again, at one point lamenting of her whip: “This is so s— at hitting them hard.” It might have been a palatable practice during the Renaissance, when Federico Grisone’s The Rules of Riding was still the canonical text. But in 2024, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
There are, of course, legitimate questions as to why the video, said to be at least two years old, has only been released now. Surely anyone whose overwhelming concern was for animal welfare would have alerted the authorities at the time, rather than waiting until the eve of the Paris Olympics to wreak maximum havoc. The more urgent worry, though, is that the Dujardin incident seems less an aberration than the tip of a gruesome iceberg.
Just look at the litany of outrages that have come to light in the past four years alone. In May, the FEI, the global governing body, began an investigation into Evi and Tanya Strasser, a Canadian dressage duo, for alleged equine maltreatment. In February, Cesar Parra, an American dressage rider who competed for his native Colombia at the Athens Olympics in 2004, was filmed striking a horse that he was riding in the head.
He was immediately suspended by the FEI, the global governing body, while Jessica Hogan, a former student of his and the person who brought the abhorrent scenes to light, said: “It has been traumatising, terrifying and disgusting ‘training’ under Cesar. I am so proud to have come forward and exposed who he really is.”
Last November, Andreas Helgstrand was excluded from the Danish national team when an undercover documentary at his stud contained acknowledgements from grooms and staff there that horses were often seen with whip and spur marks, or bleeding from their mouths. The pattern is as grim as it is recurrent: in 2020, Leandro Aparecido, a Brazilian dressage star, received a three-year suspension for abusing a small pony. In eventing, New Zealand’s Sir Mark Todd, voted “rider of the 20th century” no less, was embroiled in controversy in 2022 when a video emerged of him hitting a horse numerous times with a branch when it refused to enter a water obstacle.
“I think these incidents are a little more frequent than we would be comfortable with,” Dr Gemma Pearson, an expert in equine behavioural medicine employed by the Horse Trust, told Telegraph Sport. “There is a risk to equestrianism of losing its place as an Olympic sport, unless it gets its act together. It can’t just be the FEI. It is everyone involved with horses who needs to take responsibility.”
