While the £8,000 fine is trivial in a sport contested by horses worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, it reflects the fact that Charlotte Dujardin has already been hit financially by the loss of sponsorships and earnings from masterclasses, demonstrations and wider media opportunities. Her conduct also attracted more damaging press attention than just about any other equestrian incident in living memory. She has been punished enough.
Though her statement reiterates her remorse, it is unclear how – or if – she plans to re-enter the sport once she delivers her second child next year, though The Telegraph reports that she has not given up on her Olympic aspirations.
Charlotte has abundant skills to quietly earn a good living finding, producing and selling dressage horses. But she is also an outstanding competitor, has been a lynchpin of British teams for the best part of 15 years, and top riders do increasingly manage to combine motherhood with international supremacy – like Britain’s Ros Canter, who took team gold in Paris for eventing, and won Defender Burghley Horse Trials six weeks later.
Public receptiveness to the idea of Charlotte working her way back on to British teams is divided: brilliant she may be, but many rank-and-file equestrian fans are as yet unprepared to forgive and forget. Interestingly, two of her leading rides have been sold overseas in the past two months: Times Kismet, which Dujardin had tipped as a future Olympic horse; and Imhotep, owned by her mentor, friend and yard- and team-mate Carl Hester, who said the plan had always been to sell the horse after Paris.
Hester’s own future might also have a bearing on her plans. Carl, 57, has dropped heavy hints that the Paris Olympics would be his seventh and last, but he is still at the top of his game and has stopped short of saying ‘I’m done.’ He, poor man, is in a tight spot if and when Charlotte returns to the saddle, damned by many if he does, and by others if he doesn’t allow her to return to his yard as his right-hand woman.
To lose both of them from international dressage teams would be a body blow for Britain’s medal hopes (and some of its funding), at least in the short term. GB only started winning gold medals once these two teamed up, but Carl has had a transformative effect on the sport in Britain, and his legacy will endure through the droves of top riders and horses he has trained, and continues to train. Indeed, one of them – Becky Moody, riding her homebred horse Jagerbomb – was brilliant as a late substitute for Charlotte in Paris, helping Britain to secure team bronze with a score that was fractionally higher than Hester’s own.
Beside the rebuilding work that lies ahead for Charlotte and the British team, the wider sport must attend to its tarnished reputation too.
It falls to the governing body for global horse sport, the FEI, and its member bodies to demonstrate that it will more strongly police this sport and other equestrian disciplines, and thus build public opinion — or “social licence” — around the use of horses in sport.
While not renowned for its sense of urgency, the FEI did last June — shortly before the Dujardin story broke — give its backing to an Equine Welfare Strategy Action Plan, and established a €1 million fund to support it. The Action Plan will consider 30 recommendations put forward by the Equine Ethics and Wellbeing Commission the FEI created to examine issues around horse welfare in sport, one of which was to instigate unannounced checks at riders’ yards to check that all is as it should be.
On the plus side, in a sport in which there is always someone around — a parent, groom, or working pupil — with a mobile phone, it is reassuring that the clip of Dujardin whipping a client’s horse as she taught them did not unleash a Me Too-style avalanche of further revelations. Such treatment of horses truly appears to be the exception and not the rule, and the global furore around the Dujardin clip testifies to a determination both within and outside horse sport, that it must and will be stamped out.
This news appeared first on @The telegraph
