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[RC] FEI Championships - k s swigart

Steph said:

I think some of you need to attend a World Championship
and see for yourself what it is like. There seems to be an
impression that the WEC's are demolition derbies.

Well, I don't know about anybody else, but _I_ got that impression from
Steph herself when she said (in two separate posts on ~2 November):

Some of the other disciplines were rather appalled after
the Endurance competition in Aachen - the general press
was not kind. They described it as 'too demanding, not
enough horsemanship, too impersonal (grooms and pit
crews), too disorganized, too hard on the horses...etc.

and

The press and other disciplines weren't critical of the Aachen
course, they were critical of the sport.
...
But still, when less than 50% of entries can even 'get around' without
some level of metabolic distress or lameness... that simply doesn't
look
good.

That first statement sounds an awful lot like a demonlition derby to me.

If the people from "other disciplines" and "the general press" who
presumably WERE there, PERHAPS (note, that a translation of this word is
"maybe") it is the endurance people at the WEG who were just a little
too close to the whole event who couldn't see the bigger picture and
missed the demolition derby-like aspects of the event.

And it was because I have a dressage friend (who, BTW, DOES expect world
class dressage riders to garner higher percentage scores than she does
at Grand Prix) who attended Aachen with whom I would now have absolutely
NO credibility were I to tell her about any great horsemanship and
horses there are in endurance riding, that I even brought it up.  She
knows better; she WAS there herself.

kat
Orange County, Calif.



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