It may be just my vintage, but I am cringing at the thought of eventing being re-named. We are all worried about its long-term prospects within the Olympics, but I simply don’t get how a new moniker will make any difference to the sport’s popularity with either the IOC or the wider public. I am […]

I meant to tell you the Apathy Society cancelled its meeting due to lack of interest, but I couldn’t be bothered… How many tens of thousands of man-hours have been expended thinking up new formats for the Olympics and WEG, only to end up not far from where we started? In April, I spent four […]

What a difference a year-and-a-bit makes. Or rather, what a difference it makes when a picture of an endurance horse perched on two shattered forelegs causes a global public relations disaster, and when a national federation is exposed as so cavalier it fobs off the international governing body with fabricated results. In February 2014, not […]

The return of golf to the Olympic Games has been controversial, before a single ball is putt. During the British Open in July, the world’s best female golfer, Inbee Park, slammed the Rio qualification process for excluding so many top players. No country can have more than four players of either sex. This will work […]

Lots of people have asked me why I didn’t launch into print the day the FEI lifted its suspension of the UAE. Well, the short answer was that it was a suspension, not a ban, and was always going to happen at some point. After all, the only way the UAE can prove they can […]

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 […]

Horses are lucky, they don’t obsess about what others think of them, but if ever a horse deserved to retire with dignity, it’s Totilas.

British show jumping has taken a big gamble on a 19-year-old senior team debutante in its last ditch bid to qualify for Rio. On Monday, the British squad for next week’s mega-critical European jumping championships in Aachen was named, and it includes Jessica Mendoza, a former pony jumping star who only started competing in senior five-star […]

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 […]

I am loathe to hark back to the good old days when print media was the only form of equestrian sports reportage. Before the internet, readers didn’t mind waiting a few days, even weeks, to read about who had won what and how. This gave journalists time to write a more considered retrospective and to […]