It can be rather endearing when someone who is not a native English speaker mixes their metaphors. At the end of an intense, five-hour debate about the future Olympic formats, FEI president Ingmar De Vos told me that “we can’t keeping going round and round the hot potato.” I did know how he felt, though. […]
Two days ago, the FEI wrested its latest second/third/fourth-chance agreement from the UAE over the breaking of endurance rules and the breaking of horses. There is no black and white solution. After 20 years of doing exactly what they want, the UAE was never going to roll over in a matter of months. At first […]
No sporting body can have rules for every bizarre eventuality. You must be able to assume that the vast majority of participants have a modicum of common sense and integrity. Who, after all, would have thought you’d need to spell out that riders musn’t pass off one horse as being another in the middle of […]
I’d like to be a fly on the wall on Friday (August 7), when Rio organisers brief delegates at the Olympic test event about the “glanders” scare that they have managed to keep under wraps for months. I must underline that the OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health) and the FEI are confident in Rio’s […]
Most saddle fitters will come out to take a look at your horse and measure his withers size and shape using a flexible wire curve. This is pretty much the minimum measurement you should expect during a saddle fitting session. This does not however, tell you much more about the horse’s three-dimensional back shape (size […]
Well that’s that. In a wholly predictable, anyone-could-have-called-it manner, EC’s bylaws have fallen flat on their face. Again. It couldn’t be said they were voted down by a landslide. You can’t call a few pebbles a landslide. If all 1654 votes (1046 nays, 608 yays) had come from the province of BC alone, that would […]
Hello from sunny Florida, where I am presently enroute with my last session of saddle fitting clinics for the winter. The last three days have been absolutely amazing. I have enough pictures and stories to fill this blog for weeks! I truly love the before and after results of helping horses. This is a feeling […]
There is a glimmer of hope that at least the UAE’s equestrian federation, the EEF, is not quite as untouchable as it thought.
Well now we know why HRH decided not to run for that third term. I applaud her decision to ‘get off the pot’ so that a heavy hand could be applied to the NF of the family she married into. In case you have been profoundly out of touch this past week, the FEI has […]
Our forefathers depended on the soundness of the horse in order to be able to continue to do their jobs, or even survive. Horses at the turn of the century (and up to the mid-1900s) were still used primarily as working animals in agriculture or in the military. Their owners and riders were true horsemen, […]
