Same thought. I had to grow up and spend my own money. Should have been born in Canada. 
Of course that’s his mom talking. Also interesting.
Two more expensive childhood sports. Skiing and cocaine.
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Through his riding Lamaze developed the invaluable career attributes of credibility and name recognition with people who could make his future a very good one.
Clearly he could have had an honest, good life in horses and horse people, all of his life.
But he chose another path. Again and again.
What he does, consistently, and is still doing today, is ride well, lie, and take advantage of those who trust him.
He has blown up his own life. He may even be doubling down on that.
But he will find people to keep him going in some form or fashion. It’s what he does.
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Assuming he was referring to the skiing that is a winter sport. If he was referring to the OTHER type of skiing (using copious amounts of white powder)… well… the only kids I knew in school who could afford to experiment with drugs like that were well funded private school kids. Not destitute.
So to me, there are significant things that still don’t add up about the sad background narrative that he has used for years to:
- Get leniency when it came to prior drug violations
- Cultivate the underdog image of a person who came from a totally underprivileged background to rise to the top of the sport
I don’t know. I just get annoyed by people who lie nonstop. And that seems to be the case with EL.
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This.
Caveat: I have no way of knowing.
But the guy seems to lie about almost everything.
It could be that part of his tension with his mother is that she knows the truth. And in small ways sometimes it spills out. Whatever it is.
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A male professor sat down (uninvited) with a group of us who were having tea and a snack my first year of vet school, and told us that he had figured out why my class was a majority women. (Back before the general shift in demographics for vets. Tufts had a final round on admissions decisions that was blinded as to gender. My class was 2/3 women.)
It was because we were going to Tufts, which had a far higher tuition than state veterinary schools, and therefore, it must be because we were all rich girls and Daddy was indulging us, and we’d never have to earn a living at it, we could practice as a “hobby”.
This group included two divorced women, one of whom was raising two children, at least two lesbians, yours truly who was working 2 jobs and going to school, and a woman with a PhD in animal nutrition.
One of my classmates turned to him and suggested he move along before someone poured a cup of tea on his crotch.
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I think it reeks of a talented person with a personality disorder who has gone through life manipulating others for the betterment of himself.
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yep, that could very well be. I’m as far removed from anyone involved in that scene as one could possibly get.
I’m just cynical enough to think he didn’t act alone, didn’t choose to have a personality disorder, and that others took advantage of it.
Now, ask me my thoughts on Tiger Woods - they’re probably not popular either 
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A name from my past, Dianne Grod, said this about EL in that article: “I’m talking about him like he’s dead. He kind of is, in our world.”
Oh well.
I have no sympathy for him. Zippo. He’s had many opportunities and several do-overs, and pissed on each of them. Some of his lies are so outlandish as to be laughable. Others are downright hurtful to those of us who’ve suffered with, or lost loved ones to, cancer.
He’s flippant about facts that prove his perspective incorrect, and sees himself as a victim. He blames his mom, the FEI, the manufacturer of his diet pills, the long term healthcare system in Belgium, his “staff,” and apparently the poor decision making skills of young women with a substantial horse buying budget.
He should’ve used some of the money he gleaned from sketchy horse sales for in-patient rehab and psychotherapy.
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I’m not sure why you couldn’t just poke the horse’s foot with a pen to confirm that he had been nerved. It’s a little old school, but…
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He’s lucky I was not there, since I probably would not have bothered issuing a warning.
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Unless there’s a reason to suspect nerving it’s not the kind of thing you go looking for. I’m not sure you can elicit a reaction from hoof testing that would be conclusive either way and I don’t know anyone who surgical clips and looks for scars on a PPE. If you can even see them, sometimes the surgery doesn’t even leave much of a scar.
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I have absolutely seen vets check to make sure the horse has feeling in the feet by using a pen on a very standard vet check. If the horse reacts normally to pressure, there’s no need to shave the feet to look for scars.
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I’ve also had numerous horses vetted where early on in the exam, the vet pressed a pen (or similar pointy object) on the horse’s heels/lower pasterns. Not ever on a young horse that I recall, but definitely on older horses with some mileage.
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It isn’t entirely reliable, unfortunately.
Still worth doing.
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I’ve never had a vet check for nerving on a PPE?! I’m sure they’d have done it if I’d have asked but I don’t think it’s necessary routine to check for that.
And I had one very very strange PPE in NY where the vet did all sorts of wild stuff I couldn’t have guessed he’d do… but he didn’t do that
All of this. Well said. If he hadn’t won a gold medal and had so much success in the show ring, it would be very easy to identify him as having the same mentality as many career criminals.
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I was thinking about it and it’s been awhile since I had a vet on a ppe do the poke for nerving. I think it’s just not nearly as commonly done as it used to be for things like navicular. When I was growing up in the early 90s “nerve him” was about as common a response as “blister the stifles” and I feel like these are a lot less common with the advanced therapies we have now.
I guess it sort of stands to reason that a $300k horse would have gotten the more advanced treatments and they wouldn’t have gone straight to neurectomy. I don’t really know, though.
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But ‘Peppercorn’ wasn’t the horse they thought it was. That’s part of the suit. There’s an extra microchip in there, etc. And this horse likely was never a $300,000 type. So probably didn’t get all the high end treatment.
With that said, your point about nerving being far less common these days is definitely true. I know of plenty of lower level Eventing horses that are OTTBs and have navicular symptoms. And owners try various shoeing options, osphos, etc. There are far more management options than there used to be, and plenty of people pursue these options for horses worth $25,000, much less $250,000.
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I haven’t read the Aziz suit, if there’s someplace that has published the initial complaint I’d be interested to read it. I don’t believe my usual databases have access to Canadian case documents.
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I did however find a transcript of what appears to be a hearing which has laid out some of the goings on, not the least of which is that when they attempted to reach Dr. Pirotte, who had ostensibly performed a laryngeal surgery several days before that left Lamaze unable to speak, they found that Dr. Pirotte was on vacation and would be on vacation on the date of an allegedly scheduled subsequent surgery.
The court was also provided with an unsigned letter which appears after review to have been a draft of the Pirotte letter, which was produced after the unsigned letter was questioned. In other words, the “oh oops those were the wrong documents” doesn’t hold as they were provided on separate occasions and now it appears to multiple panels.
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