Way, way, WAY back when I was an undergrad, I flirted for two years with majoring in philosophy. I enjoyed many philosophy club meetings with like-minded argumentative nerds (remember those heady, fun-filled evenings, Margaret Boyce?) where, our tongues and imaginations loosened by cheap wine from a jug, we debated life’s answerable and (more often) unanswerable […]
Pippa Cuckson shares her thoughts on the decisions made at the FEI’s Sports Forum and Extraordinary General Assembly. We are just a few days short of the first anniversary of the Daily Telegraph article by yours-truly that revealed the enormity of doping in endurance yards owned by the in-laws of Princess Haya, president of the […]
You might not believe me, but there are rare occasions when I wish I weren’t right. The appearance of a press release titled ‘Princess Haya signals intention to stand for re-election as FEI President’ in my inbox this morning resulted in one of those unwanted moments. If you have been only dropping in on a […]
Did anyone catch the 16 minutes of infamy the Canadian horse slaughter industry garnered from Global TV’s show 16×9 last weekend? It was so awesome, and I mean that in the worst possible sense. As most of us were getting ready to greet the chocolatey and biologically impossible leavings of the Easter Bunny on Sunday […]
In the increasingly bizarre world of FEI press releases, this week we were told about a ground-breaking (pun intended, of course) footing study. Never one to shy away from self-aggrandizing, the FEI yodels across the top of its announcement that the ‘world’s most extensive equine surfaces study’ has been published. I recently mentioned the word ‘timing’ […]
It’s not every day the FEI grabs a jar of jam and spreads it all over its own face, but today is a special day. Below is another guest post from Pippa Cuckson, on the announcement today that the FEI has had a light-bulb moment when it comes to conflict of interest. The announcement, which […]
The Swiss Federation asked me to share their official statement of today regarding Endurance-Gate with my readers, and I have obliged by posting it over on my other blog Low-Down. Click here to go to the Swiss statement
I received an email from Claude Nordmann at the Swiss Federation this morning, with a press release attached and a request that I share it with readers. As Pippa’s guest blog of today has revealed, things have gone from bad to worse to insanely awful this past week. At least the Swiss and Dutch federations […]
Horse Sport International’s “Insider,” Pippa Cuckson provides a special report on the Endurance Strategic Planning Group: Colleagues often preface emails with the phrase “you couldn’t make it up” when discussing the latest surreal missives from FEI press office. These words are inadequate to describe the emanations of the past few days. If anyone still needed written […]
This morning in an email conversation with a colleague I referred to something the FEI was potentially going to do as crazy. I stopped just short of using one of my favourite vulgarisms to add colour to that adjective – chiroptera feces – and then my colleague replied to me with that exact phrase. Our […]
