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In dressage, I aim for the three Ps ? passage, piaffe, pirouettes.? Here I have a new set of Ps and I want nothing more to do with them:? Protests, Politics, Princesses (royal kind, not DQ wannabes).? Under the category of Princesses comes Princes as well.? I’m much happier just dealing with sport.? Well, I guess that includes Princesses (in all three events here), but most of the time their names are about 10 words long and with really weird spelling.? Kudos to the Danish princess who gave her horse a name with only five letters.
Jumping yesterday was exciting.? Saudis lead going into second round today and U.S. is tied for 7th but still within medal reach.? Lucky for us, because only the top seven teams go forward to the next round. ?One big story is that the German team was eliminated because they finished behind 7th place, sort of like Tiger Woods missing the cut in a major golf tournament.
?I feel terrible for the Canadian rider Tiffany Foster.? Her horse was disqualified for ?hypersensitivity.?? According to team officials, the horse had a scratch and a bit of heat in its left front coronet band.? When the vets did their hypersensitivity test in the a.m. and poked at the foot a bunch of times, the horse was ready to pick up its feet automatically.? Similar thing happened to McLain Ward a couple years ago and he got a DQ.? (Not the same type of DQ as above.) FEI later apologized.? For those of you who recall some of the DQs in China in 2008, it was because of the presence of capsaicin, which makes the legs hypersensitive and thus the horse less likely to rub a rail.? There was no test this a.m. for foreign substances, according to Canadian coach, just a heat test and too much poking.? ???
In a press conference later in the day FEI President Princess Haya said there was no question of ?misconduct? and that the FEI was very sympathetic to Foster.? All the horses in the competition were tested in the a.m., and Victor was the only one with heat and sensitive.? The test was done in the stall.? The horse was not jogged.?? Eric Lamaze spoke heatedly that it was a ?miscarriage of justice? and that he was ?ashamed of the sport.?? Foster was sobbing in the press conference and said she would never do anything to harm her horse.? I think a lot of people will be rooting for the Canadians.? Depends on whether you listen to the FEI vets or the Canadian team people as to how “hypersensitive” or not the horse was and whether it would have been okay to compete.? I’ll let the dust settle on that one for while before I decide.
