'Modern' pentathlon moving to get with the times

Basically, the idea behind the modern pentathlon isn't a bad one at all: Athletes are required to show their skills in a wide variety of disciplines. Endurance, strength, dexterity and concentration are all required. What could be more fitting requirements for an interesting and demanding Olympic sport?

That may have been what its inventor, Pierre de Coubertin, thought when he came up with the modern pentathlon at the beginning of the 20th century and included it as an event at the 1912 Olympic Games.

What the father of the modern Olympic Games is said to have had in mind was the idea of a mounted soldier whose horse was killed in battle, whereupon he had to defend himself with an epee and a pistol before swimming and running in order to get back to his comrades in arms.

Soldiers and policemen

As a result, at first it was just soldiers and policemen who competed in the modern pentathlon. Well-trained fighters and riders took their own horses to the competition. But what was described as "modern" at the time is no longer so more than 100 years later. Hardly any pentathletes today are primarily riders. In other words, they came to modern pentathlon not via equestrian sports, but via one of the other four disciplines.

Accordingly, almost none of them owns a horse that they could take into competition. Instead, the horses are provided by the organizers and the participants are drawn by lot. After only 20 minutes for the rider and the horse to get used to each other, it's off into competition.

You don't have to be a show jumper to realize that this cannot go well. The images in Tokyo of numerous drops, refusals, bucking horses, sometimes bad falls and the crying German rider Annika Schleu as the "sad crowning glory" of the whole thing were sadly inevitable.

Blessing in disguise

The scandal in Tokyo was a blessing in disguise, because it exposed the long-existing grievances on the largest possible stage accelerating the impetus for necessary change. Replacing show jumping with a cycling discipline is the right decision, even though it will mean a difficult adjustment for athletes who have grown up with the current format.

Cycling — even specialized disciplines such as BMX and mountain biking — is easier to learn than show jumping, which is very much about the right feeling for the horse and the harmony between animal and rider.

The switch to cycling, therefore, should also make it easier for newcomers or athletes looking to change events to take up modern pentathlon. After all, almost everyone has ridden a bicycle at some point in their lives, but only a few have ridden a horse.

Animal cruelty

Good horse riders are rare — whereby the less-than-sufficient riding skills of a lot of pentathletes is certainly not the most urgent problem.

What is far more important is the treatment of horses at many smaller events, where Olympic gold or a world championship gold medal is not at stake. As it is difficult to find owners who are willing to make their good (and expensive) horses available to average and below-average show jumpers, organizers often have to procure the horses from "elsewhere." In practice, this means that cheap animals from Eastern Europe are often procured for tournaments in Germany.

As German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported before the Olympic Games, this has been the case over and over again in the recent past. The horses came from Poland, were weakened by the long transport, partly emaciated or sick and in many cases generally not up to the demands of a show-jumping course.

That a "modern" sport accepts such cruelty to animals so that competitions can go ahead is unacceptable. So replacing show jumping with a cycling discipline is also a blessing in this respect.

Unlike horses, bicycles are inanimate objects. They'd have no problem with being trucked in from Eastern Europe whenever needed for a competition. They'd even wait locked in a truck somewhere overnight without complaint. None of them would suffer — or even die as a result.

This commentary was adapted from German.