I wasn't going to do Olympic recaps until they officially started but too much stuff keeps happening
A roundup from Day Negative One of the Olympics. (We're almost there.)
We’re a day away from the Olympics opening ceremony, and once again, I am compelled to post.
I’ve got one more Olympics preview in the hopper. During the Olympics themselves, I’m going to drop a newsletter into your inboxes every day at 7 a.m. about the previous day’s events. Or maybe I should do it in the afternoon after the events end? IDK. Click the button below to make sure you get that newsletter in your inboxes.
And now, a roundup of Day Negative One in Paris.
The greatest dancing horse-rider was revealed to be a horse abuser
Everybody loves dressage, the charming Olympic event where horses dance to music! Every four years, it’s good for at least one whimsical news story about the beautiful beasts daintily clip-clopping to silly music. But how do they get the horses to dance? Apparently by beating the shit out of them, at least in the case of 3-time gold medalist Charlotte Dujardin.
Dujardin has pulled out of the Olympics and been suspended from the sport of equestrian after the release of a video where she repeatedly whipped a horse during a training session. The video was filmed several years ago, and was released earlier this week. I really do not recommend watching the video—the horse is clearly in a lot of pain every time Dujardin whips it. It’s significantly more disturbing than the modern pentathlon incident we wrote about the other day.
Dujardin is the closest thing you can get to a superstar in equestrian, breaking through at an unusually young age due to her spectacular partnership with a horse named Valegro. (She calls him “Blueberry.”) Dujardin was hired in 2011 as a stablehand to help develop Valegro for an older, more experienced rider, but almost immediately started winning medals as Valegro’s rider. They won individual and team gold at the London Olympics in 2012 and went back-to-back in the individual event in 2016, setting Olympic and world scoring records along the way.
That whole story seems a lot less cute now. Did Dujardin groom Valegro to greatness by torturing him? Dujardin says the incident is “out of character…” but she whips the horse twenty-four times in the video. And she seems calm and level-headed, too, like it’s business as usual.
The controversy comes at a moment when Horse Sports are in trouble. In addition to the modern pentathlon episode, several Danish dressage riders were dropped from their team due to videos revealing abuse. (Not to mention the horse welfare issues with American horse racing.) The modern pentathlon federation was quick to axe equestrian from their program and replace it with an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course after complaints about the welfare of horses in their sport. The equestrian federation doesn’t have that option—their whole thing is Horse Sports! It’s easy to imagine the IOC getting rid of equestrian, one of the most expensive, most logistically complicated, least popular sports on their program if that sport is also responsible for repeated troubling incidents of animal cruelty.
There is one bright side: Becky Moody, the rider replacing Dujardin in the Olympics, is riding a horse named Jagerbomb.
An American team eliminated before the opening ceremony
Thursday started out great for Team USA in the men’s rugby sevens competition, as Perry Baker scored four tries in a win over Uruguay—the most ever by one player in an Olympic game.
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That qualified them for the quarterfinals against Australia, which was also Thursday. (As we wrote the other day, rugby sevens games are short and you can play multiple in the same day.) That went poorly. Team USA was shut out 18-0 by Australia, a mistake-filled disaster of a match, ending America’s hopes at medal contention.
The IOC has a rule stating no athletes can get eliminated before the opening ceremony, which they’re clearly breaking, justifying it on a technicality that rugby has classification matches to decide who finishes in fifth, seventh, 9th, and 11th places. Traditionally, the only events before the ceremony have been opening round soccer matches. This year, however, there was a round of archery in which one of the competitors set a world record, several handball matches, and all of men’s pool play and the quarterfinals in the rugby competition. The rationale for playing rugby before the opening ceremony was to host games in the Stade du France, which hosted last year’s Rugby World Cup Final and will need to be converted into a track venue by the second week of the Olympics.
It feels unfair that America’s rugby squad (and the other seven rugby teams which didn’t make the semis) got knocked out so early. They deserved to ride down the Seine with the possibility of gold in the back of their minds. They deserved an audience learning about their sport rather than wondering why the Olympics are on if the Olympics havent started yet. They deserved a few more moments in the spotlight—but that’s the way the Olympics work. You train for a lifetime to become great at a sport, spend years building towards peaking at the right time, and then you play for a few minutes and it’s all over.
A way-delayed medal ceremony
Think, if you can, all the way back to the year 2022. Joe Biden was president and Taylor Swift was playing on the radio. In the first event of the Beijing Winter Olympics, a Russian team won the gold medal in figure skating, with Team USA finishing in second place—but a PED test on Russia’s star skater, Kamila Valieva, came up positive.
To anyone with common sense, the next steps are obvious: Russia is eliminated from the competition, everybody else moves up a spot, Team USA gets gold. But that’s not how the IOC works. They’re like if the NCAA were slower and also potentially influenced by foreign governments. Nobody ever got medals in the team figure skating event, the Olympics ended, 2022 ended, and you probably forgot this ever happened.
Two and a half years later, the saga is finally concluding. On Thursday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport denied Russia’s final appeal, confirming Team USA as gold medalists. They’re trying to fly all the skaters to Paris to hold a medal ceremony for them during these Olympics, so they can get some of the experience they missed out on two years ago. But they still haven’t decided who gets the bronze—the IOC seems likely to give it to Russia, but they did the math wrong and it deserves to go to Canada.
I made a fun little video talking to Olympic athletes
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And I’m going to make some more, so go ahead and follow me on Youtube or TikTok or Instagram or whatever your platform is!