US Olympic Team

Oh Lucretia - so you are now calling me dumb and sick - you are such a pleasant person - should I soon be expecting Tammy 1/ReadyTeddy and Billyslad to jump in and congratulate you on such a marvelous post - along with a few personal statements about just how wonderful you truely are?

Can you not see that every post you have written has been in agreement with my original post, can you read? Or is it against your current hate campaign you are running against me with all your alter egos to agree with anything I have written?
 
Anyone else remember PF saying that the day eventing gets taken off the Olympic sport list, she was going to take up tiddlywinks?

Only 3 weeks to go
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On a side note re: olympic qualifcation. Found it quite interesting in today's Eventing that Matt Ryan is thinking of changing nationalities to being GB because of the "political issues involved" and that he describes the GB selection process as "fair & everybody knows where they stand".
 
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It will be a dressage/show jumping competion, with a lot of horses going clear XC.

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DD, i might agree with you there for future Olympics, but not for Hong Kong... not sure if you read eventing mag??
but here's a few quotes from there...

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Jose is likely to opt to ride Jos Aquiles as he believes he will be better equiped for the XC conditions, although he accepts he may sacrifice several dressage marks for his choice... My other horse is better at flat work, but Jos Aquiles is a better XC horse"

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And the closing part of Daisy Dicks Diary..
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Jon Pitts (fittness trainer i guess) is going to make me pull 20km on the rowing machine, in a sauna, while wearing a wetsuite

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So yeah, while the XC might well have become a 3* track, if it were in this country.. out there is most certainly wont be!!!!!
 
it seems to me that everytime you open your mouth you are looking more stupid and i should think there are more than one or two people on here who can see you are just commenting on my posts to make trouble. and even more dumb is that you clearly think these other people are me. I know exactly who Billyslad is and if he has been sticking up for me i shall remeber to thank him and his team when i next see them. Ready Teddy is on her way to Palgrave in canada and one of my best friends but thats no secret either and though i have completely no clue who Tammy1 is i must assume she has also stuck up for me or disagreed with ou to incur your wrath.
And as i have expalined I dont think there wa anything dumb about rethinking the olympics and i hae also said they might have got it slightly wrong at Athns because it is very hard to get the balance right in any thing when there is no previous to go on but four years have past and as i have said everybody is alot more educated now about what is required to make a fair test.
and silly woman as i also mentioned before if it was so easy, anybody pretty much could have won in Athens but at the end of the first round of showjumping, werent Pippa, Nicholas Touzaint and Bettina all right up there (all European Champions) and havent the United States won more medals than us at the Olympics so the werent so dumb either? Does that mean the Aussies just sent a rubbish team cos actually they didnt all et round this 'easy' course.
Be a grown up and admit you are wrong about your terminology. There is nothing easy or dumb about Olympic eventing.
 
Athens wasn't a huge course, agreed, but let's not forget the very very good experienced 4* combinations who didn't go clear. that step to skinny urn fence put Andrew Hoy and Andrew Nicholson on the floor (pretty much unprecedented), iirc, and Jeanette Brakewell took Jack the longer route at it. One lovely horse, which had jumped through the first water the best of them all imho, broke its leg at the coffin later because the rider rode in like a nutter, iirc. I heard it said at the time that that was because the coffin was small... jeez, rider responsibility, you don't jump in as if it's becher's just because it's a bit smaller than it could be! poor horse. that's the trouble at the Olympics - how do you stop the less experienced, who have to be there, from killing their horses or perhaps themselves?
Leslie only just went clear through that water with the offset boats in it, it was a bit of an eek, saved by a very honest horse. I could go on and on. Some very good combinations had faults, it isn't as if 80% of competitors sailed round clear there.
HK will no doubt be tougher, the climate alone will ramp up the level of difficultly by at least star, imho, whatever the fences are like. the humidity has been described as "like swimming through soup." you wouldn't really want to hack out in it, let alone gallop for 9-10 mins over big fences! i think some horses will really struggle to get enough oxygen in... very sincerely hope not though.
in an ideal world it would be possibly to build a 3* Olympic course with a very tight time and 4* options for the most experienced riders to take, but unfortunately there is no way of stopping the less experienced rider from chancing his/her arm (and his/her horse's neck) by taking on a really difficult route. this, understandably, can't be allowed in the Olympics... the world really is watching.
 
Just a random tangent but I found an old VHS that I had of the Sydney Olympics eventing, I didn't remember until I watched it again just how tough that course was. And then there was that horse (think there was more than one tho) that broke its leg. They tried to cover it up with the commentary but they never mentioned it again and I could see from my experience with racehorses, the horse had clearly had some sort of career ending fracture. It all made quite unpleasant viewing.
 
Here's been my view on the Olympics. It possibly CAN'T and SHOULDN'T be a ****.
It can't because we, equestrians are not in charge of winning bids for venues. Therefore, you have places that aren't horsie and don't have the natural terrain to hold x-c. Remember, you guys are incredibly spoiled in this regard. (very jealous!). It's like we have the Tour De France. The pinnacle of cycling. We can't have that degree of difficulty in a lot of areas. Also true with the Iron Man in Hawaii.
Secondly, we should be more inclusive. Meaning there are countries where they don't have **** riders but in order to keep eventing alive, we need those countries to still be interesting in this sport. And we need that pr.
For me, I had no idea what eventing was. The only english around on the West Coast was hunter jumper stuff and then we had one dressage person who had proteges. Hilda Gurney. But that was it. I came from western because that's what was available. And then I did a little jumping at a gymkhana and switched. But I never knew x-c existed, never knew foxhunting was still around. Nothing.
Then LA Olympics came. And the cheapest horse tickets were for x-c because I was ain a single parent home, this was the only feasible option. Plus, it was not up in LA, it was down in Rancho Santa Fe. My mom got to play in the clubhouse which suited her. And I got to watch this incredible, totally incomprehensible feat called cross country. I was star struck and from then on, I was hell bent to do eventing. I even had the opportunity to go to school in Virginia. And I've stayed ever since.
While I'll never do the Olympics, I was exposed to the sport and it hooked me. That's what it's about.
Sally O'Connor had a great story from Athens. She said there was one lone guy from some lone country (I forgot which one). And he came out of stadium in tears. In tears because he got to finish an event in the Olympics. He didn't have a shot to medal but he had his dream come true to participate.
 
lisakb - you have it in a nutshell. OLYMPIC SPIRIT.

I posted earlier the fact that if in the course of "normal" **** events it would never ever be held in a venue like HK. Same goes for locations like Rio De Janeiro a candidate city for 2016 with a tropical climate. Would you want to send a team to that knowing they would have to tackle a course akin to Badminton or Burghley? No.

But in the eyes of the general WORLD the Olympics are the pinnacle of sporting achievement - even if you have no interest and sport A, B, or C, only H - you watch it! As much as you can. Goodness knows how many young minds are set on the path to a sporting life from this. For each sporting event there will be their own World Championships but the audience will generally be the people who have and existing interest in that field. But the Olympic medals are more elusive to win, and more public in their achievement.

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Seems to me that everytime you open your mouth you appear more deranged Lucretia. Are people allowed to have independent opinions in your parallel universe or do you lose it like this in RL?
 
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