Did They Really Mean to Say That?

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 quote riders at length and in context.

Nowadays, we are all racing to be the first to get our stories online before the rosettes are even dished out. This has led to the small sound-bite, a paucity of analysis, and the wholesale re-purposing of the same small set of “quotes” provided to all by the press centre.

The radical change in the news-gathering process is not necessarily all for the best. It’s also brought with it the culture of the public relations advisor and the subtle, but not always skilled massaging of what riders have had to say before the media are given it.

Oh, for a bit of off-the-cuff candour! I am sure that if riders said what they really thought, we would not read quite so many of the type of contrived utterance that makes you cringe. Here are two instances from recent weeks.

First, a press release in the form of a free-to-use interview with Matthias Rath popped into my mailbox from Aachen.

I am looking forward to Totilas’s appearance (we hope) at the European championships as much as the next man – IF it happens. But as we know, it’s a really big IF, because there have been more false dawns with the Rath-Totilas partnership than the number of phantom endurance rides concocted by the UAE.

Even allowing for national pride, I am a bit surprised that Aachen is “bigging-up” Totilas at this still early stage. I’m clearly not alone, as the free interview has had minimal take-up in the English language media at least, and appears to have been discarded by both eurodressage and dressage-news.

The blurb starts with the highly questionable description of Rath and Toto as the “currently most famous equestrian sport pair.” Naturally Matthias is asked about a Toto-Valegro duel and comes over as almost too confident. For sure, Toto stood ahead of the champion last year in the CDIO Aachen Grand Prix and Special but, in the former class, so did a bunch of other equally startled riders, during a most unusual couple of days.

Since that aberration, Valegro’s scores in his 11 classes at five international shows, including a world championship and a world cup final, have consistently topped anything achieved by Toto/Rath since their one and only championship appearance together in 2011, and broken more of their own records. In contrast, Totilas’s sole appearance since Aachen 2014, at Hagen a couple of weeks ago, resulted in two wins, but with scores representing a 2-4% drop from their mini-peak of 2014.

It’s quite a leap to predict a battle of equals next month, especially since dressage is relocated from its remote permanent facility to the totally different atmosphere of Aachen’s main stadium for the purpose of the Europeans.

I’d keep my powder dry. So much easier to come from behind! Instead, we have Rath looking naïve at best and cocky at worst, neither of which I believe is a true reflection of a rider who has shouldered a mountain of unreasonable expectation. I fear it can only end in tears. Again.

I also wish Scott Brash had been empowered to explain the absence of Hello Sanctos from the British show jumping team at the Europeans in a slightly more up-front way than has been reported. The likelihood of the world’s best horse not being available to help the reigning Olympic gold medallists in their last ditch attempt for Rio qualification has been rumoured for some time, so its confirmation was not a surprise.

For the past year or so, Sanctos has played relatively little part in our Nations Cup/team scenario and Scott has instead been given carte blanche to chase the big money with him on the Global Champions Tour and at other five-star shows.

The topic was finally raised in Horse & Hound couple of weeks ago, in the strange absence of any official announcement from the British equestrian team.

In the H&H story, Scott is quoted as saying it is “not in the horse’s interest” to put Sanctos forward for selection, as the 13-year-old has done three major championships and should be given the best chance to compete at Rio.

Only further down do they mention he will go instead to Spruce, where he will receive a six-figure sum merely for showing up and, as the world knows, has a tremendous chance of winning the seven-figure Rolex Grand Slam. Why not just say this was the reason? No one this side of the pond seems to mind at all. Quite the reverse.

First, it would be hard to find a rider less subject to the green-eye from his peers than Scott. They all think he’s a nice guy, and a beautiful rider, and as William Funnell wrote in his H&H column, Scott’s spectacular success does them all a favour: the fact these huge sums of money can be realistically be won attracts owners and helps underpin the price at which everyone’s Grand Prix prospects can be sold.

Second, a lot of people really want the Grand Slam to be won – giving a publicity boost to Rolex who many still feel was dealt a shoddy hand in the FEI/Longines top partner negotiations of 2012.

And thirdly, Sanctos may well be the greatest jump-off horse of the decade, but that does not make him certain to deliver in a two-round contest. London 2012 is a while ago, now, and it regrettably has to be said that Sanctos was neither use nor ornament in the team leg at WEG.

Instead, we are asked to believe that a short-ish road trip to Aachen, where he is only in essence needed to jump the Nations Cup, will somehow take more out of him than a transatlantic flight. And on top of that is the “I’m all right jack” inference that he’ll be going to Rio, presumably as an individual, even if his compatriots crash and burn in Aachen.

It takes me back to 1988, when the owners of global superstar Milton wouldn’t let him go to Seoul, thereby denying our beloved John Whitaker the real chance of becoming Olympic champion. The reason commonly put about was that Seoul was too long a trip for Milton, to whom exceptional sentiment was attached; he’d been produced by the owners’ daughter, Caroline Bradley, who died tragically young at 37. In those days, team officials took a much tougher line over non-availability (bearing in mind, too, that there was then no state funding for elite riders and horses), and barred Milton from competing internationally for several months.

There cannot be a person of sound mind who still believes that the majority of top-ranked jumping riders will always put medals over money. The moment to debate the ethics of that has probably already passed, though the consequences could yet be far-reaching. I sat during a recent horse show “VIP” lunch with a veteran TV sports producer who opined the time had come to expel certain sports from the Olympics – if the Olympics is no longer their epitome. He thought it farcical that golf should be considered at all for inclusion, and he put tennis and show jumping (though certainly not dressage and eventing) in the same bracket.

That is a topic for another day – probably when we have a clearer picture of where the Global Champions Tour’s lawsuit against the FEI is heading. Meanwhile, stay strong, Toto. And Go Scott!