Well now we know why HRH decided not to run for that third term. I applaud her decision to ‘get off the pot’ so that a heavy hand could be applied to the NF of the family she married into. In case you have been profoundly out of touch this past week, the FEI has cast the UAE out of its Famiglia, as described in an unambiguously worded statement last week. It is too little, too late? Let’s consider the situation.
In her latest blog post, Pippa raises a list of excellent points regarding the FEI’s awesome database which national federations populate, apparently, with whatever they want, in the happy knowledge that there is zero vigilance from Mission Control. If there are bogus endurance competitions, who’s to say there aren’t other fake results from other disciplines in other parts of the world where a little palm greasing can gain you the win in an FEI event without ever going near a horse?
When I first learned of the UAE’s fake competitions, my first thought was how little effort they had made to cover their tracks. As Pippa has said, they simply lifted entire sets of results from previous events (which we can only assume actually took place) and slapped them into the FEI database, complete with impossibly high completion rates and horses in their 20’s. The UAE’s brazenness is an unfortunate sign that they have been committing their ignoble deeds – from doping, to horse and rider swapping, to running their competitions like mafia weddings, to staging events that took place only in their imaginations – on the expectation that they were impervious to any consequences from the FEI. Also unfortunate is the fact that while HRH was Prez, the Emiratis were actually safe in their assumption. I mean, one of the very last things that happened on Haya’s watch was that the 2016 World Endurance Championships were awarded to Dubai.
On the surface, the FEI’s turfing of the UAE from its membership seems like the strongest penalty they can possibly wield. Too bad they undermined their clean up by appointing Lord Stevens yet again to head up the investigation into the UAE’s heinous activities. Hello, Mr. President Ingmar de Vos. Have you conveniently forgotten that the good Lord has been on Sheikh Mohammed’s payroll rather recently, and specifically in matters regarding corruption and cheating in horse sport? Let’s also not forget that the Lord’s company Quest found the Sheikh’s son Hamdan to be free and clear to become the World Endurance champion in Normandy after a few simple photographs proved he’d committed horse swapping at a previous world championship. The smell of raw sewage just won’t go away as long as the FEI keeps taking the crooked road to justice.
Too little too late? As far as I’m concerned, yes. Bandaids on a broken leg.
