So WEG is going to Bromont. I can’t exactly say ‘I told you so’, because I was never convinced the Bromont bid could pull it off, especially after last year’s humiliation. In case you didn’t deem it important enough to cache it away in your mental hard-drive,  Bromont was the last bidder standing but the FEI told them to go drum up more money and then added insult to injury by re-opening the bidding process. In the style of ‘look what the cat dragged in’, Welly World, Lexington (more fried chicken? please no), and an undetermined city in the UK were declared as new bidders. But as we all know by now, the Brits dropped off like a crocus that bloomed too soon and was killed by late snow, and Welly World packed it in a couple of months ago. That left just the two, and now we have the verdict. Poutine.

I have nothing say anything against poutine as a delicacy, because I have yet to eat it. I somehow can’t reconcile the idea of french fries, gravy and cheese curds in the same mouthful, over and over, until the giant pile is gone. But it can’t be any worse than the un-fare they served at WEG in Lexington, can it?

Yesterday I had two contrasting press releases in my inbox:

Canada Wins Bid to Host 2018 FEI World Equestrian Games – from Equine Canada of course

and

Kentucky loses bid to host World Equestrian Games in 2018 – from WDRB.com in Louisville, KY

The Louisville piece is all of four brief sentences expressing only the facts and no opinion one way or the other, which suggests Lexington’s bid was somewhat less heartfelt than the first time around when they bid for 2010. But what I find even more interesting than the shoulder-shrug of the ‘we lose’ article compared to the orgasmic ecstasy of the ‘we win’ EC announcement, is this:  that the Bromont WEG has been branded as ‘Canada’, where the Lexington bid was ‘Kentucky. If there is a rah-rah nationalistic patriot in North America, it’s the US, and not Canada – especially not the part of Canada that keeps threatening to break off into its own poutine-dom.  I find it odd that the Lexington bid never got branded as an American bid. I suppose it might be because Welly was in the running for a while, so the two needed to be defined regionally, but perhaps I should be tipping my hat to the Bromont bid committee for so successfully creating a nationally inclusive image for Bromont 2018.

I’m going to have much more to say about Bromont, and about the 2017 WC Final being awarded to friendly Omaha, but you’ll have to read those thoughts in the pages of Horse Sport International.