Endurance-belgium.comLeonard Liesens
October 18 2013
FEI, thru the voice of its Secretary General Ingmar de Vos has immediately reacted on what has been said by Pierre Arnould to The Telegraph. The communiqué is displayed on their website.
By doing that, FEI shows once again its incapacity of tackling the problem and acting quickly and effectively, without protecting this or that group.
So it is Pierre Arnould who is guilty of reporting the system and of speaking publicly because he thinks it is his duty as member of this FEI endurance committee to work on the welfare of his discipline.
In its high level speech about “Clean Sport”, FEI claims all the time they are working for the horse welfare and don’t want seeing any horse entering an event helped by forbidden medication.
But… What did FEI up to now to tackle the problem with concrete actions? Despite having been warned by several federation –and not the least ones- Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, France since many months now.
Why each horse fatality taking place on an event or the day after –and duly known by the endurance community- is not the subject of an investigation? Why –if those investigations have taken place- are the results not transmitted to the FEI Tribunal like it is the case with doping cases? Why are riders who have repeatedly killed horses not pursued? Who is aware of the reason of the horse death at Florac, horse ridden by a rider from Qatar? Which products have been discovered in the port-mortem? Where are the reports and the punishment?
What about this horse collapsing and dying in Sardinia-Italy recently? The same rider was also riding Eclipse at Tarbes and leading him to euthanasia.
From our sources, we can claim that the Belgian Federation is giving full support to Pierre Arnould and will shortly decides which actions to be taken.
It is also now clear that Pierre Arnould is not alone fighting. Several European figures are also nauseous and want this to stop and our sport recovers its nobility.
FEI didn’t like the Toulouse Group which was led by the late Pierre Cazes. Will this group revive thanks to another Pierre? In any case we are behind him and all men and women of good will are welcome. Send an email to endurance.belgium@gmail.com.
Are we the only website devoted to endurance which dare to publish on the subject ? Are the others with their head in the sand so they don’t want seeing what happens?
Now that the general press has embraced the topic, how can we figure that the process will stop? The forums are dumb, mum's the word because you never know…
