Did you catch the great sport at Spruce Meadows last Saturday? Two thumbs up to CBC for providing the live coverage that gave me a sneak peak at our Pan Am Show Jumping team. Not that I have any insider information on the Pan Am teams, which are being announced en masse this coming Saturday the 13th. And by en masse, I mean ALL the Canadian teams in ALL sports, not just our equestrian team. This strategy reminds me of when EC attempted to delay announcements of Eventing and Dressage teams back before London 2012 so that one big announcement could be made during Spruce after the last team to be chosen, the Jumpers, was finalized. My complaint then would be even more applicable to the Pan Am team announcement. When you lump more than one team into a single announcement, the law of diminishing returns applies. The highest profile sport or discipline gets exactly as much media and public attention as it would if it were announced on its own, and all the others get LESS than they would if they were announced on their own. EC’s press release about all three equestrian teams will hardly be the first thing the Globe and Mail or Vancouver Sun decide to run on their first Sunday sports page, given that there will be team announcements for all the traditionally sexy sports coming out simultaneously.
But never mind. Here is some publicity of my own to preempt the official news which won’t be news any more by then anyway since athletes have been notified and no amount of gag ordering will stop the information from leaking out. The most obvious non-surprise to me is the Dressage team, since the leaderboard of declared riders is right up on the site for everyone to download. Barring illness or injury, I’d say our Pan Am dressage team will be Belinda and Megan as our two GP riders, with Brittany and Chris filling the small tour spots. Technically, Canada needs only one GP horse on the team to be eligible for the Rio team qualification (which isn’t actually up for grabs as long as the Americans are sending Steffen Peters and Lauren Graves). But there is a 1.5% bonus added to the GP scores, which gives our top two GP riders a slight edge over all our small tour riders, if their qualifying averages are used as a predictor of results in Caledon next month. Canada is in great shape to win silver yet again in Pan Am dressage – which will mean Canada’s only team hope for Rio is to qualify a composite team of three individuals (at great expense to those athletes, who will have to rush all over hell’s half acre trying to get as high on the world ranking list as possible over the next year).
The other easy team to guess is the Jumpers, especially given the strong performances in the RBC Grand Prix at Spruce last weekend. I’m going with the usual suspects, though I won’t go so far as to name mounts since most of them have more than one horse equal to the team job: Eric, Tiffany, Yann and the unstoppable Capt. Canada. There might have been an argument for letting some young blood have a go at the team experience, were it not for the fact that Canada really needs its best team in Toronto. They didn’t get a Rio spot at WEG last summer, so Canada absolutely must be on the podium. Dream Team needed, especially with the likes of Venezuela breathing down their necks. Which leads me to a curious question: why is Pablo Barrios out there competing unhindered by the positive drug test that stripped him of his individual gold medal (and his team its gold medal) at the 2014 Central American Games? It took SEVERAL months for the FEI to update its database to reflect the disqualification, while Pablo merrily rode around many CSI courses in Florida. He competed at Spruce last weekend, and the FEI’s case status table for athletes is currently a blank page. So what gives? How can an athlete fail a doping test at an FEI sanctioned competition and lose his medals, but not face any sanctions whatsoever from the FEI?
I emailed our beloved Mission Control with this exact question way back in late March, and received the following response: “The FEI will be taking over the matter shortly as the FEI’s legal procedures kick in once the official notification has been received. The same procedure applies at the Olympic Games, Pan American Games, etc.” I was then directed to check for updates on the aforementioned case status table, which as I’ve already said, is blank. I guess by ‘shortly’ the FEI really meant ‘eventually’ or maybe ‘never’.
If Pablo turns up in Toronto, I am certain no tot be the only one asking awkward questions.
Courtesy of CBC, I saw a few exciting Canadian horses for the first time. And courtesy of Starting Gate Communications, here are photos of the three that most impressed me.
Tiffany and Tripple X look like they’ve cemented the partnership of a lifetime. They were ever so close to a top three finish in the RBC Grand Prix, taking that most painful of rails, the last fence, in the jump off.
Yann brought out his newest four legged friend, First Choice, to an impressive fifth place and Canada’s best result in the Grand Prix.
Eric and the delightfully named Coco Bongo had a rail, but the ten year old stallion looks destined for greatness once he’s had a few more miles in the ring. Holy crap can that horse jump! Which is a blessing since he can’t canter to save his life. When he’s not soaring a foot over everything (except the one he knocked down that is) he looks perfectly awful to sit on. The DQs reading today’s post will have no problem seeing the world’s most lateral canter in the photo above. For those who can’t, take my word for it. Coco Bongo has a canter that resembles an electric mixer with four beaters. Full credit to Captain Lamazing, one of the only riders out there who could get that canter around a 20 meter circle, never mind a 1.6 meter course.
So the toughest team to call is the Eventers, not least because there are so few candidates. The old ‘one step forward and two steps back’ adage continues to plague Canada’s eventing team. Based on the results at Bromont on the weekend, I have to wish one rider could take more than one horse onto the team. If that were the case, I’d expect to see Waylon on at least two horses. Selena’s a likely candidate, and then I just don’t know. It would help if the outdated results software Bromont uses had nationalities displayed, just in case there is a sleeper on that list that I don’t know. Dear eventing fans: I apologize for being less than up to speed if I’m missing something, but I’m having trouble seeing enough strong combinations to field a medal-winning team this summer…It’s both fortunate and ironic that our eventers are the only discipline already qualified for Rio, so the Pan Ams are not nearly as important as to the DQs and Jumpers.
