I can’t find it now. I wish I could find it. It was about how equestrian sports are in trouble at the olympics. The animal rights people got the ear of the paris folks and got a whole bunch of (?hard to follow?) rules passed prior to the games and that they are now looking to go after “abuses” and rule breaking in an effort to remove horse sports. It was a fairly long post.
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I think she’s probably got a strong, smart team behind her who are smart enough to know that bowing out now is safer for the long game than to stay in and risk being sanctioned and having a medal taken away. Maybe. Either that or it’s really, really unconscionably horrible and losing a medal/gaining a suspension are inevitable and it’s the only way to play the long game with respect to eventually salvaging her career.
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Ugh. But, it’s not like we weren’t given many years of warning that PETA, all the other rabid animal rights folks and their ilk were not out to get our horses taken away from us. The warning were there that we needed to clean our act up immediately if not sooner 
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She said the same thing at the symposium I was at and it was not abusive at all, it was in a - go gallop get them forward - type of ride. Can’t see it being this.
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I’m wondering if they had already sent the video but nothing was happening, so the whistleblower then threatened media? CDJ is fairly well known even outside horse people in the UK.
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I wonder if he deleted it? I couldn’t find it. Or it wasn’t public, then.
The statement reads very similar to Kruth’s which, in my opinion, presents the possibility that there’s a catch and kill conversation such as “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to release this statement within 24hrs and we are going to contain the video to the best of our abilities. If you push back or make excuses for what is seen in the video, you’re on your own.” If that is true, I wonder if the penalty starts and ends with never competing at the Olympic level again.
Per The Telegraph: “Charlotte Dujardin, Britain’s three-time Olympic champion, has been forced to pull out of Paris 2024 over a video showing her hitting a horse repeatedly on the legs during a slow-motion trot, Telegraph Sport understands…”
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Kicking a horse to get it in front of the leg is abusive? That can’t be it.
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There were a couple UK media sources referencing CDJ on the ground whipping a horse on the legs.
There is also a note that the video was given to a Dutch lawyer who made contact with the FEI on behalf of a client who wishes to remain anonymous.
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I don’t find anything alarming in the article. I thought we do want to train our horses to respond to the leg and if we are retraining a sluggish horse that is used to ignoring the leg, a kick, at first, may well be in order. It seems better than the alternative of constantly driving them forward every few seconds. Is a kick while riding abusive?
However, I’m very much against horse abuse and for revealing people who are engaged in abusive practices.
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Does anyone know what soured between CDJ and Mount St. John? I can’t remember the timeline of Freestyle leaving CDJ’s yard.
ETA that in spite of all the news here in the colonies the past weekend, this has shaken me more.
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Sounds like they were working piaffe/passage. I’ve seen trainers use light taps with a dressage whip and others use whacks with a lunge whip. And some who lose their temper when the horse doesn’t pick up their legs. 
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This article says canter work:
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It’s hard to believe that the Dutch have a convicted child rapist on their volleyball team but this is bad enough to take out one of the top British riders.
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Chasing a horse at the gallop while whipping their legs sounds more challenging
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Based on her statement and actions, I don’t doubt that it is a bad video. The only consistency between the articles right now is that Charlotte is teaching from the ground, not riding, in the video, and the media does not yet have the video. I doubt this has anything to do with her telling riders to kick their horses to get them in front of the leg.
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I read it as whipping horse on legs during slow trot- that to me means passage or piaffe work either in hand or with a student and tapping/ whipping horses legs to make them raise higher?
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Maybe it’s a translation issue?
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