An American’s guide to Olympic Modern Pentathlon

Paris 2024 is the last time we’ll ever see Olympic athletes try to befriend horses they’ve never met before.

This is part 11 of RINGS RODGE, a 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: field!

Why should I care about modern pentathlon?

The Olympics exist so we can watch people attempt strange tasks: throwing gigantic weights, swimming to music, flipping themselves 30 feet through the air into water, and uh, breakdancing. Modern pentathlon features the strangest strange task, and it’s happening for the last time.

Modern pentathlon is a multi-sport competition combining five events, one of which is equestrian. But unlike the competitors in the Olympics’ main equestrian event, the competitors don’t get to bring their own horses. In order to best simulate the situation a 19th century military officer stranded behind enemy lines might experience—we’ll get into this later—the athletes are randomly introduced to horses they’ve never met 20 minutes before the competition, and must befriend and ride that horse. I asked Team USA’s Jess Davis how to make friends with a new horse:

But this is the end of Olympic Horse Befriending. After a distressing animal cruelty incident in the Tokyo competition—WE’LL GET INTO THIS LATER—the people in charge of modern pentathlon decided to replace horses with another event for the 2028 games.

Ooh! So this is like the Decathlon and the Triathlon, right?

Well, it’s got parts of both… and not necessarily the best parts.

The decathlon and the heptathlon (I’ve never been clear why the IOC doesn’t trust women to complete all 10 events) are great because they feature a wide variety of events in the athletics category, from running to jumping to throwing. When people say the decathlon features the world’s best athlete, they’re onto something.

The problem with the decathlon is that there’s no good way to score the event, which makes it difficult to follow. The decathlon features a complicated scoring system involving complex mathematics which not only rewards the winner of each event, but grades them on how well they performed in the event. This makes it an awful spectator sport, since it’s tough to figure out who’s winning unless you’re a human calculator.

The triathlon is great because it combines three separate sports into one, easy-to-follow event. The person who bike-swim-runs the fastest wins. But of course, it’s tough to find people who are good at biking, swimming, and running, and tough to find fans of biking, swimming, and running.

The modern pentathlon combines the decathlon’s inaccessible scoring and difficult sell to viewers with an even more arbitrary set of combined sports than the triathlon. It’s perfect. The best sport in the Olympics.

How does this work?

Ohhhhhhhhhhh nooooooooooo I have not been looking forward to this one.

The first sport is épée fencing. Unlike regular fencing, it’s a sudden-death format where the first hit wins. Then there’s a 200 meter freestyle swim. Then there’s the show jumping round. Then there’s a second fencing round.

The scores from these events are added up—the athletes get a certain amount of points based on how many fencing bouts they won, how fast they swam, and how good a job their horse did on the obstacle course.

These scores affect when you start in the final event, a combined running-shooting event that works like the biathlon in the winter Olympics. (Running and shooting used to be held separately, but they combined it into one run-shoot.) It’s a 3,000 meter race with four shooting sections done with a laser pistol rather than a live gun. The highest scorer in the first four events starts first, and the next competitors are staggered based on how far behind they were. Whoever crosses the finish line first wins, so the ending is actually somewhat easy to follow.

Why is this in the Olympics?

The IOC has long held a soft spot for modern pentathlon because it is The Olympic Sport: the only sport actually invented specifically for the modern Olympics. It was supposedly invented by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man whose idea it was to hold the modern Olympics in the first place.

The ancient Olympics had a pentathlon, featuring things ancient Greek military men had to do, so the idea was that the modern Olympics should have a contest simulating the things a modern cavalry officer would have to do. They imagined a scenario where a soldier was separated form their troops behind enemy lines, and needed to return to their troops. They’d have to do some running, some swimming, some swordfighting, some pistol-shooting, and ride a horse. But it can’t be any horse: It specifically has to be an unfamiliar horse, because that hypothetical stranded cavalry officer wouldn’t be able to find a horse they knew. The event was introduced at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, just two years before a war that would prove their perception of war to be impossibly quaint.

Whenever the IOC talks about getting rid of sports, the modern pentathlon is on the chopping block. After all, this is a sport with almost no fans that makes for awful TV and is based on the job requirements of military officers 110 years ago. But they’ve survived based on sentimentality. (Nobody tell them that de Coubertin probably didn’t invent the sport—research revealed that Viktor Balck, a Swedish military officer who brought the 1912 Olympics to Stockholm, is probably responsible for the modern pentathlon. )

So why are they getting rid of the horses?

It turns out, sometimes the unfamiliar horses are a bit too unfamiliar.

At the Tokyo Olympics, Germany’s Annika Schleu was in first place after an absolutely dominant performance in the fencing competition—she won 29 of 34 bouts, and seemed set to medal after finishing fourth in Rio. Then she was paired with a horse named Saint Boy. Saint Boy was not interested in helping Schleu medal. When the camera cut to her at the start of her run, she was already bawling with the realization that her Olympic dream was getting dashed by a Bartleby the Scrivener-ass horse.

Schleu began whipping Saint Boy aggressively. That’s allowed. Her coach also reached over the barriers and gave Saint Boy a big punch in the ass. That’s not allowed, even though it’s presumably a lot less painful than the whipping. Schleu got Saint Boy to go over a handful of jumps, but Saint Boy refused to complete the course and Schleu got zero points in the event.

The whole debacle probably wasn’t Schleu’s fault—Saint Boy also refused to complete the course for a Russian rider he was assigned to. But she handled it poorly, and her disastrous ride went viral, leading to outcry from animal welfare groups and quickly becoming the biggest modern pentathlon story of all time. Saint Boy’s refusal to jump proved the effectiveness of labor stoppages, as he all but ensured the removal of horses in modern pentathlon. Within months of the Schleu debacle, the UIPM (the organization in charge of modern pentathlon) had already voted to eliminated horses after the 2024 games.

What happened next was a period of widespread internal strife in the modern pentathlon world. The athletes hate the decision to get rid of the equestrian element, with over 90 percent of pentathletes surveyed said they’d like to keep horses in the event. I get it: they are literally horse-riding experts, and they’ll lose one of the main skills which makes them elite in this sport.

But the speed and determination of the UIPM makes me think they kinda wanted to get rid of the horses anyway. They insisted the IOC would axe modern pentathlon from the 2028 games unless the horses were dropped, without providing any evidence that the IOC had told them anything like that. They blew past suggestions to keep horses but focus on animal welfare. The UIPM powered through meetings with athlete walkouts and overrode athlete voices to vote on the change. I guess now the athletes they know how Saint Boy felt!

I think the UIPM had solid reasoning that had nothing to do with the Schleu incident: Horses are expensive, making it tough to host events and recruit new athletes. And horses are already part of another Olympic event, making it hard for modern pentathlon to stand out. They were smart to pick something new.

So what are they doing instead?

You’re gonna love this.

The UIPM claimed that they received 61 new sport suggestions to replace the horses. They tragically declined to release the full list, but did post on Instagram that the suggestions included drone racing, roller skating, and “traditional Gambian pillow fighting.” I also enjoyed the suggestion by Rose Eveleth on Defector that the horses should be replaced with mechanical bulls.

In the end, the UIPM went with an obstacle course based on the ones used in Ninja Warrior TV shows. They’ve already done a handful of test events of the new format:

Throwing a Ninja Warrior course in the middle of the Olympics is undoubtedly a big W, even if it is just one part of a five-part sport. It involves ridiculous athleticism and is very cool looking! I suspect it will be the first thing to make people who aren’t Olympic weirdos say “wow, I should watch this!”

Is Team USA good at this?

We haven’t won any medals since 2000, and none of our eight competitors in last year’s 2023 world championships made it out of the qualifying rounds into the 18-person final. But our American Ninja Warriors will probably change all that in 2028.