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Back Issues
| Equestrian aftermath | | Print | |
| Nov/Dec 2008 | |||
 Lynne O’Donnell looks at the legacy of Hong Kong’s hosting of the Olympic equestrian events after they were rocked by doping dramas.The Hong Kong leg of the Beijing Games, which began with drama and promise, ended ignominiously in a drugs scandal. Four riders were thrown out of competition and the disqualifications mounted up for weeks afterwards, scalps including medal winners, contenders and former Olympic champions, all caught perpetrating one of the cruellest crimes in sport, doping their horses to make them jump higher. As the number of disqualifications grew, the silence of Hong Kong’s government and the Jockey Club which bankrolled the billion-dollar events was deafening. No one, it became evident, wanted to be associated with a competition that had demonstrated just how corrupt horse sports are and how cruel some of its highest-profile champions are. And nor could anyone really argue against those in the IOC who would like equestrianism – which involves more people and costs more money than any other Olympic event – dropped from the everlengthening roll-call of sports. The chance for Hong Kong of squeezing a legacy from the minor role it played in Beijing’s production faded as soon as the final medals were awarded. Things began well enough. Sandwiched between two typhoons – Kammuri just before and Nuri the day after the August 8-21 competition – the events promised to be well run and attracted crowds intent on basking in an historic Olympic glow. The Jockey Club had poured more than a billion HK dollars into facilities said by all to be second to none. More than 200 horses – each valued at millions of US dollars – were seamlessly imported, housed in fabulous “six-star” stables, and cared for like the superstars they are. They were trailed by around 2,000 riders, coaches, vets, officials and journalists. Beijing had passed the buck to Hong Kong because its own prevailing filth precluded offering a safe quarantine environment for the horses, and because the Jockey Club is superbly equipped for handling horses, from transport, housing and food, to stumping up enormous sums to upgrade existing facilities and build new arenas, courses and clinics. But – to the detriment of the Games and, worse, the reputation of equestrian sports – the Jockey Club’s world class laboratories were seriously under-estimated. No one appears to have trusted that the club’s scientists would detect illegal substances. How wrong they were. The Jockey Club labs are considered the most advanced in the world, testing samples from every horse that runs on the two tracks here twice a week for most of the year. This is how Hong Kong maintains its integrity, and the platform on which it is building itself into a bona fide fixture on the global racing circuit. Few believe the day it is fully integrated is far off. So when it was announced hours before the final event that four riders had been banned on doping charges, contempt was the only rational reaction. The substance in question has always been illegal, and though a test had been available for two years, no horse in elite competition had tested positive. Riders and teams obviously believed they could carry on as always. It seems the use of this chilli pepper-based substance to cause either pain or numbness in the horses’ legs during training is widespread, the aim being to sensitise their shins so they jump higher to avoid the pain hitting the fences would cause. It’s cruel, sly, exploitative and dishonest. Government claims that hosting the equestrian events would leave a true legacy have evaporated, and the Jockey Club is left with the task of spending yet more money on an Olympics museum – to display some of the detritus gathering dust at the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne – in an effort to claw some good PR from the whole distasteful fiasco. Instead of using its massive pot of cash to build hospitals, schools and other much-needed public facilities, the Jockey Club has been backed into a corner by the overseers of a corrupt sport and the local cronies of the corrupt regime that should have made facesaving an exhibition sport at the Beijing Games. Equestrianism, its true nature revealed, should be struck off the IOC agenda after London 2012. ■
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