I guess they have many coaches??
I only see three (inc Richard). I think one of them is the fencing coach, I’m guessing the other one is swimming…?
The jumping was disgusting. They were hanging on to the poor horses mouths, over the jumps around the course. Never did they give them their heads over fences. They just sat still, well as still as they could get. It was horrific. I would NEVER allow them to use one of my horses for this.
I just don’t get it. This is an Olympic event. You should know how to do it. If you don’t then you don’t need to be at the Olympics. I mean how hard can it be to take freaking lessons 2-3 times a week? If only one of them did this they would clean up so easily.
The Pentathalon has to be the easiest Olympic sport. Mind you I do not do fencing, never tried. But hey I would at least take lessons several times a week to learn! Then continue to be the best possible. These people don’t even excel in one of the sports they are required to do. They are the laughing stock of the Olympics.
Msrobin - you come from a place of absolute ignorance. Diference of opinion is one thing, but spouting off without knowing anything about a sport is another.
Several Pentathletes have competed at the Olympics in more than one sport, and some in two sports at the same Olympics. If you were a high level competitor in any sport, I doubt you would have this disdain.
Besides, it is over, give it a break from chewing the fat.
[QUOTE=FrittSkritt;6510377]
I only see three (inc Richard). I think one of them is the fencing coach, I’m guessing the other one is swimming…?[/QUOTE]
I know only 3 are listed there… but they probably also have a running coach and a shooting coach… and I am wondering if maybe they don’t just have TONS of coaches and maybe more than 1 per phase?
[QUOTE=msrobin;6511206]
The Pentathalon has to be the easiest Olympic sport. Mind you I do not do fencing, never tried. But hey I would at least take lessons several times a week to learn! Then continue to be the best possible. These people don’t even excel in one of the sports they are required to do. They are the laughing stock of the Olympics.[/QUOTE]
Hey msrobin, why don’t you hop on a plane and come to our Canadian national championships this weekend?
You’ll get your butt kicked five different ways and then some.
‘These people’ often do excel in the individual sports, competing to international standard. Athletes have even qualified for the same Olympics in two sports (pentathlon and fencing; pentathlon and shooting). Athletes from the Pony Club countries have competed internationally in PC disciplines.
JER, can I ask a sincere question that I don’t think has been answered yet. They own their own fencing and shooting gear, right? Why don’t pentatheletes have to supply their own horses (or at least their own country/team supplies them).
Cost and logistics!
[QUOTE=Foxtrot’s;6512000]
Cost and logistics![/QUOTE]
Can’t the same be said for dressage, showjumping, and eventing? At some point, if you want to do it badly enough and the sport requires it-- you find a way to make the cost and logistics work. Lots of sports are expensive and difficult… sailing, polo, heck even golf. We don’t let people show up at the olympics and hand them a showjumping horse… why do we hand them a MP horse?
I frankly wish they’d swap the riding stage for biking. It’s more “modern” and part of triathalons anyway. And would resolve all these issues about poor riding/horse treatment etc.
I guess it might be that the concept behind it is that if you were fighting your way out of enemy territory, you would be riding a strange horse, not a horse you knew.
That whole idea is so arbitrary, though. It would certainly be simpler and probably less expensive if they rode bikes!
[QUOTE=MHM;6512140]
I guess it might be that the concept behind it is that if you were fighting your way out of enemy territory, you would be riding a strange horse, not a horse you knew.
That whole idea is so arbitrary, though. It would certainly be simpler and probably less expensive if they rode bikes![/QUOTE]
I am no history buff here, but I think our cavalry usually brought their own mounts and didn’t expect to find them chez counquered country 
Basing it on history is a little silly, at this point. I mean, the gear being used for the other phases is nothing like historical. They’re not shooting muskets.
I’m no history buff, either, but I thought it was mentioned earlier in the thread that the modern version of the sport was pretty much invented by Baron de Coubertin based on his own ideas. Maybe he was thinking of an escaped prisoner, who had to use whatever he could find.
This is what it says on Wikipedia, for whatever that’s worth:
As the events of the ancient pentathlon were modeled after the skills of the ideal soldier of that time, Coubertin created the contest to simulate the experience of a 19th century cavalry soldier behind enemy lines: he must ride an unfamiliar horse, fight with pistol and sword, swim, and run.[1]
If we really “modernized” pentathalon, one phase would be a test on intelligence procedures, one phase would be driving ATVs, a test on the Geneva Protocol… etc.
Well, it must have seemed modern to him at the time. :lol:
[QUOTE=vxf111;6512027]
Can’t the same be said for dressage, showjumping, and eventing? At some point, if you want to do it badly enough and the sport requires it-- you find a way to make the cost and logistics work. Lots of sports are expensive and difficult… sailing, polo, heck even golf. We don’t let people show up at the olympics and hand them a showjumping horse… why do we hand them a MP horse?
I frankly wish they’d swap the riding stage for biking. It’s more “modern” and part of triathalons anyway. And would resolve all these issues about poor riding/horse treatment etc.[/QUOTE]
Foxtrot’s is right about cost and logistics. This year, the World Cups were held in Charlotte NC, Brazil, Hungary, Russia and China.
In a pentathlon world cup, the competition starts with qualification rounds, in which 3 groups of approximately 24 athletes compete in four sports (no riding) to earn a place in the 36-person final. That’s a total of 140+ athletes (men and women) competing in non-riding qualification rounds for 72 total places in the final.
So, if you have to have your own horse, there will be 140+ horses in need of shipping, stabling and services, but only 72 will compete. And this week you’re in Hungary but you need to be in Chengdu in two weeks. To add to that, your home country is Egypt or Australia or Korea, and you aren’t living off huge sponsorships or trust fund money or GP showjumping winnings. The cost of shipping a horse to one venue might exceed your competition budget for an entire season.
The original idea was that a cavalry soldier should have the skill to get on a horse – any cavalry horse – and ride. You can call it antiquated or quaint or whatever but that’s the origin of the sport.
vxf11, all the pentathletes I know like – love, actually – riding. I assume we both watched the same Olympics video, but somehow, I didn’t see the Blair Witch Riding Project that you saw. There were a few bad rides. There were some tough horses. There were some less-than-optimal combinations. There was nothing that I haven’t seen in an AA jumper class at a big show – and those were presumably people on their own horses.
I don’t think I’ve posted a single thing about the MP riding in the olympics this year, have I? I’m not really intending to comment on the riding in this olympics, more on the concept of the sport in general. I saw only a limited set of clips. One rider pulling back on a horse causing it to flip… it wasn’t a tactful handling of a tense situation (but I’m glad he’s okay) and another clip of someone just HANGING on the mouth of a very nice, very game horse and slamming down on its back as a lot of rails fell. I am sure there were some good rounds too. But oy, the boy rounds were not pretty.
Your statements re expense, winnowing competition, etc.-- all that seems to me like a great argument for why swapping biking for riding would be an ideal solution. Shipping a bike’s no worse than shipping the shooting and fencing gear, right? Given the reality that bikes are more common than horses for transportation these days-- wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for the riding phase to be bike riding?
The reality is that any elite sport can be costly. The showjumpers may win money but they also spend a fortune shipping around from show to show. Horses are expensive. Shipping is expensive. Other disciplines don’t solve that using catch riding as the solution.
I love riding too… but I know I couldn’t get on a strange horse in a public forum and give it a competent ride around a 3’6 jumper course. Hell, IHSA was 2’6 for my level and I was terrified and HATED DOING IT. I know I couldn’t do the riding phase of MP at all competently, so I don’t do it. Loving to ride and riding a strange horse adequately are two distinct concepts.
If people want to screw up their own horses with bad rides, I guess it’s a fee world. But the idea that people generously donate their nice horses only to have them get bad rides, I’m just not comfortable with that. I did watch the video from the US trials from a year ago (blanking on what exactly that was called). You posted the video. And some of the rides were pretty scary. I think some of those not-as-good rides would have gone BETTER on a familiar horse.
I know you really love the sport and its YOUR sport and you are a rider… but the fact of the matter is, there’s some scary riding in the sport in general. I can step back enough from the things I love to accept some realistic criticism. I think MP might be a better sport in general if the riding was replaced by biking. Less expensive, more inclusive, more “modern,” no harm to animals, broadens the scope of potentially interested athletes, easier for the host country… why is this such a bad idea? Other than the fact that you love to ride?
[QUOTE=vxf111;6512304]
If people want to screw up their own horses with bad rides, I guess it’s a fee world. But the idea that people generously donate their nice horses only to have them get bad rides, I’m just not comfortable with that. I did watch the video from the US trials from a year ago (blanking on what exactly that was called). You posted the video. And some of the rides were pretty scary. I think some of those not-as-good rides would have gone BETTER on a familiar horse. [/QUOTE]
While we’re at it, let’s shut down the riding schools, and the summer camps, and the IEL, and the IHSA, and anywhere else people learn to ride on borrowed horses.
And if anyone out there wants to start riding, let’s just tell them ‘no’ and hand them a bike. That will prevent them from making any mistakes on the learning curve to perfection.
The exceptions to this, at least IYO, are those who can afford their own horse from the get-go.
The same could be said of ANY discipline that involves riding a horse. That’s why it’s a bad idea.
There’s a height/speed/safety difference between things like IHSA and MP, no?
And a big difference between scary riding on the horse you yourself pay vet bills on, and on someone else’s?
[QUOTE=vxf111;6512427]
And a big difference between scary riding on the horse you yourself pay vet bills on, and on someone else’s?[/QUOTE]
The horse wouldn’t see it that way.
Also, pentathlon does not abduct horses for competitions. Owners loan them to us. Many of these owners are familiar with the sport.
If it’s okay for an owner to be a scary rider on their own horse, why isn’t it okay for an owner to loan a horse out to another scary rider? I don’t get your logic, other than that you don’t like the riding phase of modern pentathlon.
I realize the horses aren’t abducted. But as several people who themselves lent horses and posted have made clear-- there wasn’t full disclosure about HOW BAD some of the riding could be. It seems like in Atlanta, there wasn’t even full disclosure about the number of rides.
Why does it matter who owns the horse? For one, incentive to improve skills. For two, catch riding is hard. I think some of what’s not great about these rides is due to catch riding and the riders would ride better on a familiar mount. They’re not all bad riders, but riding another person’s horse under these circumstances is far more difficult than riding your own. And the strangeness seems to breed the really bad problems (i.e. flipping the horse. That seemed to me NOT to be necessarilyu terrible riding skills or malintent but rather a rider who just didn’t KNOW how to ride a horse acting that way. If it was his own horse, preumably he’d have worked out how to deal with that before the competition).
But at the base level if a horse starts refusing because of my scary ride, that’s my problem to deal with. If a horse starts refusing because of someone else’s scary ride, that rider walks away from the problem. If I break my own horse, I pay the vet bills. If you break him, again you walk away. I just don’t know that everyone who lends a horse realizes what they’re getting into.
Example, I lent my horse for pony club nationals. To someone I knew well. Trained by our mutual trainer. Even under those circumstances, things were done with the horse that I was not anticipating (not bad things, but not things I would have done either). There’s really only so much you can know going in when you don’t KNOW who is going to be the one who draws your horse. Some MP riders might ride better than me! But I don’t know if it’s them or the really awful rider when I raise my hand and volunteer my horse. Do you really think people who loan there horses are told “look, we might put a rider on your horse whose response to anything unusual is to pull back hard and he might flip your horse over. That cool?” I mean, the level of disclosure couldn’t possibly be that way. Are the people who lend horses shown vidoes of the riding skills of everyone coming to the event?
FWIW I wouldn’t lend my horses for IHSA riding either. But there’s a whole lot less that can go wrong riding 2’6 equitation versus 3’6 jumpers. Just the element of speed along makes it much more difficult and dangerous. And with IHSA you can limit what classes your horses are lent for, which significantly cuts down on the bad riding (in my zone, every school’s 7,8 riders were big eq kids. There was no risk of pulling a bad rider if you lent your horse for that division). MP seems to be such a mixed bad. Some great riders. Some average. Some really scary. IHSA wasn’t really the same. At the lower levels, with less experienced riders, they don’t jump. In MP, everyone jumps and FAST and HIGH.
Isn’t dressage the original form of military riding? Why don’t they ride a dressage test? Showjumping doesn’t seem at all representative of what members of the miliary actually do.
