This is not an endurance story. It’s a story of cheating and corruption. And it’s far from over.
The characters include what we could now consider ‘the usual suspects’:
1. The Maktoum family, in the form of Sheikh Hamdan, Sheikh Mohammed’s second son (one of Sheikh M’s 23 offspring). The son of Sheikh M’s senior wife, Hamdan is the Crown Prince of Dubai. In 2008 he was chosen by his father to be the hereditary prince. ‘Step mother’ is not quite the right term for what HRH is to Hamdan, since the term refers to a situation in which a man has children with a wife, then divorces and remarries – whereas Sheikh M is concurrently married to both women (among others). Sheikh Hamdan fell close to the tree in that he really digs endurance racing.
2. The horse Marmoog, aka Prince de la Sabliere, aka JSAS, a horse that has more results on the FEI database than actual miles under his girth, and whose microchip number recently changed on an event’s entries list.
3. Lord Stevens’ company Quest, which has of late been buttering its bread on both sides, working for both Sheikh Mohammed AND the FEI in investigations into alleged cheating by the Sheikhs’ own family.
4. The FEI, that cozy little corner where all the players converge.
A little background for you:
The ‘real’ Marmoog started life as Prince de la Sabliere in France. He is a chesnut horse with minimal white marks on his face (You can see a pic of him ridden by Sheikh Hamdan here, along with the Telegraph piece by Pippa Cuckson which broke the Marmoog ‘ringer’ story in March)
In the winter 2011-2012 the horse was sold to the UAE by Sebastien Courtial
In April 2012 the horse was re-registered in ownership of Nad Al Sheba Stables as Prince de la Sabliere
April 28 2012 – he competed in a 160km CEI in Dubai with an Indian jockey
June 2012 – he finished second at the 160k CEI Numana as Prince de la Sabliere with Sheikh Hamdan
July 2012 – he was formally entered for the world endurance championships as Prince de la Sabliere with Sheikh Hamdan
August 7 2012 – his name was changed to Marmoog, after the closing date for world championship entries (This wipes the name Prince de la Sabliere from the FEI results database, though if you use a very small link on the right side of the page you can call up the historic name info)
August 25 2012 – a horse with big white face and white nearside hind leg started at the world championships on the UAE team using Marmoog’s identity – the horse was eliminated for injury at vet gate 3 (you can see a picture of Marmoog’s im-horse-onator here – and yes, that is Sheikh M riding along behind his son)
Feb 15 2014 – The “real” Marmoog competed in a CEI for the first time in 20 months, at the Presidents Cup, Abu Dhabi – he is now owned by Hamdan’s stables, Fazaa, but he was ridden by someone other than Hamdan himself
Late Feb 2014 – renewed rumours about Marmoog prompt some questions to the FEI, including from Pippa Cuckson
March 7 – The FEI advise they have asked Quest to re-investigate (there was an initial investigation but a lack of evidence prompted the FEI to close it – apparently the investigation did not include basic scrutiny of photos of two very different horses from the two 2012 races, photos that were not difficult to source)
March 11 – Pippa’s “ringer” story appears in the Telegraph
March 16 – The UAE changes Marmoog’s name to JSAS using their remote access facility to the FEI database. This wipes Marmoog from the results database and also from the horse search menu (as Marmoog was not his birth name). In fact, if you look up team results from the 2012 world championships on the FEI database, Sheikh Hamdan is listed as riding JSAS, a name that didn’t exist for the horse until almost two years later.
March 17 – a senior endurance rider (obviously not one from the UAE) spots that Marmoog, aka JSAS, recorded a new microchip ID on the official start list for President’s Cup.
And now the picture from my side of the desk:
I was following the story of Marmoog and his not-very-doppleganger with a mixture of morbid curiosity and disgust through the first half of March. On Sunday, March 16, Pippa emailed me with the jaw-dropping news that Marmoog’s name had just changed to JSAS on the FEI database. That Pippa discovered this change quite literally as it was happening is a testament to her thorough research methods, not to mention a tireless determination to expose the many poisonous tentacles the story has developed. When I got Pippa’s email, I was stunned for two reasons. Firstly, I could not believe that a horse that was – at that very moment – UNDER FEI INVESTIGATION for having been replaced by another horse in the world championships, was permitted to change its name (the result of which was to effectively bury all evidence of the existence of a horse called Marmoog to anyone not familiar with the history). The other shocker was that the FEI database changed on a Sunday morning. What workaholic goblin was prowling the darkened halls of Mission Control on a Sunday, I wondered?
The answer pries open a whole new can of FEI worms, it turns out.
Pippa asked the FEI how the name could be changed not only in the middle of the investigation, but on a Sunday. I bet you can’t even begin to guess at the answers. It turns out that all horse information is entered on the FEI database by the National Federations, and it isn’t even checked by the FEI. Here is the official FEI response Pippa received on March 24:
“Managing the profiles of the FEI human and equine athletes in the database is the exclusive responsibility of the National Federations. It is a process the NFs manage themselves and it does not require sign off from the FEI. To date, the FEI database contains the details of 270,083 horses and 91,104 human athletes. It also contains information about and results from approximately 12,200 international shows dating back to 1974. Information about some 10,000 FEI officials, committee members, organising committee members, FEI and NF staff members are also included in it. The creation and maintenance of such a database is only possible with the involvement of the NFs which are responsible for their athletes, horses and events. It is a process based on trust which is the norm in international sport.”
And apparently that trust includes name changes of horses that are under investigation for identity fraud.
As if things weren’t already murky enough, I went on the FEI database just this morning in order to provide the links you may already have clicked on above. Having a rough memory of what numbers the FEI had quoted to Pippa last week, I was taken aback to see all those numbers have now been changed on the FEI database’s home page. All the numbers – of athletes, officials etc – have been lowered, including 230,000 horses instead of the 270,000 that were listed up until some point in the last few days. So the FEI doesn’t bother itself with such trivia as a name change that erases all results under the name Marmoog in the middle of an investigation, but they have time to count up and correct the total numbers, which are more or less meaningless to anyone not concerned with justifying the FEI’s lack of oversight and accountability in this regard. Why would the FEI change this info now, of all times? I guess I should be asking them that question.
As for the change of Marmoog’s name right smack in the middle of the investigation, here is Pippa’s question, followed by the FEI response:
Does the FEI have any sort of “alert” facility which will flag up activity on the data of a horse/rider that is suspended or under some sort of other investigation?
“There is no such facility. The profiles remain open to the NFs who may make changes even if the athletes are suspended. The main changes that are made are recorded in the entry’s history and can be viewed by the FEI at all times. The element which is never open to change is the FEI ID number, which remains a constant throughout the competitive career of an athlete – human and equine. This is the fail-safe that prevents any potential abuse of the system.”
Indeed. So fail-safe that Marmoog’s, I mean JSAS’s, microchip ID on his entry form for the 2014 President’s Cup was different to the one recorded previously. And no one in the FEI or at the race caught it. It was noticed by a concerned athlete who saw the anomaly after the race had taken place.
You know who else didn’t catch it? Quest. Yes, that paragon of investigative integrity that has become something akin to the FEI’s goon, warding off any who dare to question anything the FEI does or says. I’d like to take this moment to coin a new phrase: Conflict of InQuest.
The latest word is that it’s not known when the inQuestigations will be complete. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the findings will not see the light of day until after HRH is begged to stay (and of course she’ll accept, IMO) for a third term at the Extraordinary GA on April 29.
If anyone is wondering why on earth Sheikh Hamdan would ride a false Marmoog in the World Championships instead of just entering the horse by its own name, it’s probably because the real Marmoog was injured or unfit to compete at the moment, and the horse Hamdan wanted to replace him with wasn’t qualified. As for the wrong microchip number: here is a very sinister scenario that, if found to be true, would be a wrecking ball to the FEI’s ‘fail-safe’ horse ID system (and the fall out from that would be enormous problems with the entire global horse movement business): If Hamdan decided he wanted the bald faced horse to stand in for Marmoog, he might have had Marmoog’s microchip either dug out and placed in the other horse, or he might have had someone wipe clean the microchip that was in the real Marmoog and produce an exact copy to be placed in the fake Marmoog (although given the bleedingly obvious visual dissimilarities of the two horses it seems like an awful lot of unnecessary work to cover up the swap). When Hamdan brought Marmoog back to competition in 2014, the horse needed to have a microchip, so they just slapped any old thing in there. Unless Quest takes the (to me, anyway) logical step of scanning the actual microchip in JSAS (that’s Marmoog) and the one in his stand-in, we will never know the real story. And if disabling or swapping microchips is as easy as the evidence suggests, we wouldn’t know the real story anyway.
I think I’ll go take my real dog (who has a microchip) for a walk to the barn and give an apple to my real horse (who also has a microchip). I need a dose of reality right now.
(Thanks to Pippa Cuckson for making the considerable effort to keep this blogger up to speed on what is nothing short of an insane story)
