Second semi final off now… I am still loving these horses I think even I could get round on them.
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OK maybe not that one… poor Ukrainian rider.
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I watched the pentathlon this morning, and yeah, a lot of lovely horses. I particularly liked the one whose description was apparently just “easy”.
The commentary was awful though - the woman obviously knows something about horses but the two men were awful.
Also, that poor woman who started her course before the bell rang and just kept going despite being rung out multiple times. She looked like a not terrible rider, so a shame that she missed the bell and got eliminated.
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Kids explain Olympic equestrian 
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I only watched Group A qualifiers on replay on Peacock, and the 2 male announcers did not seem to know the nose from the tail of a horse. the (aussie?) one kept saying that a horse “jumped positively” and acted like it was the horse’s fault when poor riding caused a refusal.
I was quite proud of our USA entry @JER who rode well but had an unfortunate rail at the end. I was cheering for her the whole time.
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Rodrigo speaks
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I don’t agree with all of Rodrigo’s points. However, I do think it’s an interesting idea to have yellow cards and red cards, much like they do in eventing. Some things are clear red cards. Then there are those who skirt by a lot but build up enough yellows to earn that red card.
I could get behind that pretty easily for all FEI events.
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I have to agree with much of what Rodrigo says, I think it was disgraceful that a bit of blood caused the elimination not only of one horse and rider but the entire team. There needs to be a drop score with a four horse team. And he’s also right about the individual riders having an advantage of fresh horses if they didn’t compete in the team competition. I’m not sure I agree about jumping off for anything other than a gold medal though, those horses jumped a lot of big courses in less than a week.
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I concur.
I believe the idea of eliminating the fourth member from each team was to allow room for more horses and riders from different countries to compete at the Olympics.
But the result, intended or not, is to punish the ones that are there, either by eliminating a whole team when one member does not get a score, or by making a rider feel like they can’t pull up and retire when that would be the best thing for a horse having an off day.
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