Things are happening;
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And now it’s out of the Olympics beginning in 2028. Of course, the picture they use to discuss its removal is a cringy picture of a woman attempting to jump.
Isn’t that the woman who started all the problems this year?
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@trubandloki- Looking at the caption of the photo, you’re right. I guess I didn’t recognize her without her rage-filled, tear-drenched face showing 
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Either picture just makes me think, Omg, that poor horse. 
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That horse looks like it’s trying so hard to get over that jump. 
What a lovely tryer.
Please keep us posted, @JER (and others) - I feel that I’ve learned so much about this sport!
Re: the Olympic sport being switched out (boxing, weightlifting, etc.) … the sport of Equestrian Vaulting is trying so hard to get included in the Olympics. It is an FEI sanctioned sport and horse welfare is paramount (well, to the same level as all the FEI horse sports, lol.)
Plus, there’s the added crowd appeal of flashy costumes and music (for freestyle and tech test anyway) and really cool stuff a la figure skating!
For horsepeople, watch the way the horse goes. The horse will telegraph how in tune the vaulter is and every swish of a tail or break in rhythm is a “tell” which the horse judge is watching for.
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Interesting that all three sports being pushed out are having issues with their governing bodies.
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The article linked above seems unreliable. (maybe because of translation)
Here is another report that makes more sense;
Is there a sport out there that is NOT having issues with its governing body? I can’t think of one, honestly.
I think at this point, any scandal short of rape, doping, and/or outright revolt of your athletes constitutes a robust, functional institution. Kinda like Congress!
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The IOC has sort-of kicked out other sports before. Wrestling got the temporary boot a few years ago.
Boxing has the slight problem of match-fixing which is by now a time-honored tradition in Olympic boxing. Weightlifting has the slight problem of embezzlement, bribing and unrepentant doping.
Pentathlon? Poor governance but perhaps not criminal like the other two sports. The leadership at the UIPM - which is not supported by the athletes or other stakeholders in the sport at this point - also lied about the IOC telling them to cut riding. That didn’t happen and the IOC didn’t appreciate the lies.
The IOC and IFs are funny. Russian Athletics (track/field) have been banned for years due to a bunch of adult athletes doping. But then USA Gymnastics isn’t banned from international competition despite facilitating and covering up the sexual abuse of hundreds of athletes, many of them underage. I imagine this all has to do more with money that anything else - but then USA Gymnastics is bankrupt and owes a LOT of money following that recent settlement.
It’s worth noting that the exclusion of pentathlon (so far) from LA 2028 isn’t really about the riding. The FEI sports are all in so it’s not horses that are on the chopping block. It’s the UIPM and its governance.
Vaulting in the Olympics - well, why not? Actually, the biggest issue is the athlete cap, where they struggle to keep total athlete numbers under some number, might be 11k or so. Of course, that’s a self-imposed limit but you have the logistics of the village and all the other boondoggles associated with the games as well as the two-week run of the games, which probably should be longer for the summer edition.
I hope that everyone is reasonably relieved that breakdancing didn’t make the cut for LA. That one’s best left to Paris and no more.
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My personal favs to cut from the Olympics are:
Soccer, where the World Cup is far more significant than Olympic medals. That would seriously reduce the numbers of athletes and running the competition over multiple days.
Golf, where there are many tournaments that already have massive global reach and huge money to be won. Apart from being the most boring game to watch on TV.
Tennis, which already has the various international “Opens” in the PTA and WTA tours with massive global coverage. Who ever remembers who won the gold medal in the Olympics?
Rugby, which is a sport I love but it, too, already has a World Cup.
The Olympics, to me, are the show case of minority sports, such as Modern Pentathlon, as well as the track events, gymnastics, rowing etc. I can see the need for “new” sports such as the BMX in cycling but there does seem to be a serious imbalance in the number of medals in e.g. swimming vs e.g. triathlon.
End of musings, time for bed.
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I think you’re on to something here … people hear of esoteric sports from watching the Olympics. It has shut many doors for funding and scholarships that vaulting is NOT an Olympic sport. I only know Pentathlon via Olympics (and COTH, lol) but soccer, tennis, etc. don’t need a recruiting tool since they have their own critical mass.
Interesting the evolution of figure skating, though … they deliberately restructured the sport to be more exciting and appealing to non-superfan crowd watching the Olympics and look how well that worked to raise the profile of the sport as a whole.
Not gonna lie, though … didn’t watch break dancing. Not going to cry that it didn’t get picked up permanently.
@JER - how long will it take before it’s known which direction MP will take and what will happen with the governing body?
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The IOC added sports like golf and tennis for the broadcast revenue. If a sport is in the Olympics, the broadcast rights are owned/sold by the IOC.That’s how they make their money. Never mind that they’ve had trouble getting the men’s pros to show up.
Football/soccer has never been a marquee event on the men’s side but it is on the women’s, mostly due to FIFA’s long history of discrimination against women in the sport.
The IOC’s pursuit of the ephemeral ‘youth audience’ is mostly a testament to their own institutional tone-deafness. Their business model - bribing, influence peddling and living large in five-star hotels - failed to adapt with the times and now they’re scrambling for relevance while knowing that only dictatorships and kleptocracies want to bid for the Games. So they’re desperate to add sports that they perceive as having youth appeal, even if those endeavors are not exactly sports. Voila breakdancing, which might have had a moment of cool in 1980.
It will be interesting to see what happens after the resounding debacle of Beijing 2022.
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I think you are correct in your discription of the IOC and too many bloated and unaccountable International Governing Bodies. FIFA makes the IOC look positively good!
But I am slightly curious about where LA and the USA fit, as either a kleptocracy or dictatorship??
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Vaulting would also potentially solve the problem of accessibility in the horse sports, which they’re currently trying to accommodate by the stupid teams of three rule that results in riders putting their horses at risk from the pressure of needing to finish the round since there’s no drop score.
I believe there are vaulting programs in a lot of countries that don’t have upper-level show jumping, eventing or dressage teams, and being able to share a practice horse and do a lot of practice without a horse makes it a lot easier on the pocket, too, I would presume.
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The IOC had to change tactics after the Winter Olympics 2022 situation. The only bidders were Almaty and Beijing. They’d tried unsuccessfully to bribe some city - any city - in Switzerland to host the games and every other option was snuffed out by public vote. The good people of Oslo took it upon themselves to not only veto the Olympics but to publish the hilariously imperious IOC contract demands - introductions to the king! Special cakes! VIP everything! - much to the IOC’s embarrassment. (Yes, the contracts did actually mention cakes for IOC members.)
At this point, the IOC didn’t want to risk further public humiliation.
LA was a failed candidate first - it was Boston that was supposed to be the US city on which the Games were foisted - but the citizens of Boston rejected it quite emphatically. LA had been the only other city on the block but had also backed away fearing a public backlash. But now with only Paris still interested, the IOC was left with two candidates, one of which wasn’t really a candidate so they took the unprecedented step of awarding 2024 to Paris (which had been rejected multiple times during the IOC bribe-and-build heyday) and 2028 to Los Angeles at the same time.
The real reason for this was that the IOC feared they’d have no takers for these turkeys and would have to go back to Beijing or somewhere worse like Doha.
I lived in LA for many years and I would say it’s on the verge of kleptocracy, with a crumbling infrastructure and policies aimed at promoting inequality and benefitting the 1%.
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Do you have a link to this? Sounds like a great contract to read!
We are hosting the 2032 Olympics. Of course I bitched and moaned about it as I would rather the whole shebang scrapped…. But of course, will be aiming for tickets to the GP freestyle!!
“Hate the Olympics. Two to see Charlotte please”
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Pardon this silly question, what do they mean when they say obstacle racing?
