Eh, I don’t really give a crap about the whistleblower, who they are, or why or when they blew the whistle. The fact is there is such a power imbalance in dressage that the organizations would not take any complaints about any powerful dressagers seriously (and by power, I mean top riders or rich people). If someone wants to be heard and they know they are going to get crushed in the process (which is obviously happening here), they pick their moment (or they send in an undercover reporter, and/or they get out and publish the video finally). This moment was picked because it could not be ignored. It HAD to be addressed. The top rider’s conduct is atrocious, contrary to the personna she sold the public, and obviously not a one time mistake (based on the ease at which the conduct was deployed). It’s the conduct that is the BAD here. I think this conduct needs to be harshly and consistently dealt with to instill avoidance of such conduct. How or why it had to be that moment rationally seems to be based on a moment that could not be ignored PLUS a few other situations (Helgstrand, Parra, e.g.) paving the way. The thing about Helgstrand and Parra is that there has not been a punishment serious enough to befit the crime and instill future avoidance. What was learned is that you cannot give the organizations a waffle ground to avoid a serious punishment. This whistleblower ensured that would not be the case here.
CDJ was NOT made a martyr here: she put her own head on a pike when she visciously whipped a horse. If it was Jane Doe doing the whipping, would you attack the whistleblower? Unfortunately, attacks on whistleblowers do dissuede others from reporting similar conduct.
I do not agree with certain bloggers taking moments out of time or unfortunate resistences in a warmup arena to mean that a rider is abusive. I do believe when you have video footage of actual protracted whipping that doesn’t appear to have a purpose, of whipping under saddle when a horse is trying to please the rider but just not freaking “animated” enough, of tying legs together with bungies, of tying heads down, of stabbing a horse in the rump with a pitchfork…no one should question the whistleblower. It doesn’t matter how these videos are exposed, just that they are exposed, the conduct severely punished, and that no organization condone this behavior by refusing to get involved. It is really sad to me that there has to be such heinous video evidence AND that the heinous video evidence has to be exposed to the world wide web and a public outcry to happen for action to be taken.
