tristar
Well-Known Member
But they will be the people who ultimately decide equestrianism's future in the Olympics. As current or former horse riders, we all know far more about horses than the public - but that doesn't matter to the IOC. Just look at figure skating and ask the ISU how they're actively (negatively) changing the sport to make it more appealing for the public to watch - and that's a sport with, yes, questionable ethics but no animals involved.
The public (and most of us, but that is not my point) don't want to see horses falling, being hit/kicked and hauled around. Maybe we know what the use and potential benefits of spurs and whips are but the public don't - and they don't care. They just don't want to see it.
Look how disastrous the pentathlon at Tokyo was for all horse sports. That is why I keep saying on all of these posts that horse sports need to pay attention to what that percentage is saying and stop dismissing them as people who have no idea.
It really doesn't matter if horse people can continue to justify these things to themselves - and that's without getting into equestrianism's reputation as being a classist, white led sport.
i only said that because its surprising how even people without the `horsey knowledge thing` can see how bad it can be sometimes, even to expressing on occasions how they like certain ways of riding, not only what they don`t like, because to improve things you have know where is the better place, its just interesting to me how the innocent eye can see good or bad