If you are feeling sad to have missed coming to France for the WEG Eventing, don’t. You probably would have missed the cross country anyway and resorted to watching it on TV like my friends who sat in stationary traffic for an hour five kilometres from the venue before giving up and turning around at around 11:30 am yesterday. I know journalists who walked six km to get here after the official media bus they were on didn’t move for so long that cobwebs developed around the wheels.  There must have been thousands of very, very angry people out there in the Normandy countryside yesterday. And here is the proof of how epically bad it was. It was front page news in the local paper this morning.

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If you don’t speak French the headline translates as ‘Monstrous traffic jam at Equestrian Games’. It’s actually more poetic than that. Bouchon is the French word for a cork. The use of ‘bouchon’ for a traffic jam has a wonderful image for me, of a cork crammed into the lanes with nothing getting through. And nothing getting through is exactly what was happening. The WEG organizing committee’s response?  Let me copy and paste it for you because otherwise you just won’t believe the arrogance and lack of apology contained therein:

Alltech FEI World Equestrian GamesTM 2014 in NormandyNoon Update on access to the Haras national du Pin (Le Pin national stud) for Eventing
Public parking areas opened at 6.30 a.m. this morning.At 12 midday, 10,000 cars and 44 buses were parked on the site.There are presently 35,000 spectators watching the competition.Traffic conditions were fluid until 9 a.m.At 12 midday, it took an estimated 1 hour and 15 minutes to travel from Argentan to the venue and 45 minutes to travel from  Nonant-Le Pin to the venue.Traffic is now beginning to flow more freely.

Spectators should take only the D926 to access the site.

The  Organizing Committee reminds that a large team of traffic wardens has been put into place to facilitate arrival and parking, and recommended spectators to travel to the venue as early as possible .

Reading without too much effort between the lines: ‘it’s your fault, spectators, for not getting up at 5 am and arriving at 6:30 to an event that starts at 10.’ We know it’s a flat out lie that it was taking ‘1 hour and 15 minutes’ to get there at noon. ‘There are presently 35,000 spectators watching the competition’. Yes, and there are another 15,000 (they’ve been bragging about the 50,000 tickets they sold for weeks) waiting to get in at one pm when you sent out this release.

I heard from one member of the media today that a colleague of theirs spent three hours in traffic to get in and three and a half to get out again (because yes, the traffic leaving was predictably similar). My one set of friends who persevered from 9:30 to noon, parked and got in, then spent an hour and a half waiting in line for hamburgers. And they were the lucky ones. As they waited at the counter for their hamburgers they overheard the people in the burger truck saying that they had only 40 burgers left. Behind my friends was a line up of at least 200 people.

Oh, and did I mention the mud?

Oh, and did I mention the mud?

I’ll be back tomorrow with an eventing wrap up, but I thought you needed to know what you missed here at the worst WEG ever.