One of the favourite pre-Olympic observations from those administrators whose job depends on getting athletes to the start line in optimum condition is that “the bases have been loaded”.
It is a way of Team GB and UK Sport saying that everything had now been done away from the actual white heat of competition and that it is now just down to the sportsmen and women to bring home the glut of medals we have come to expect. What they have never previously contemplated is that one of their very best and most reliable ‘loaded bases’ would have already taken aim at their own feet.
On Tuesday afternoon, that all changed. Charlotte Dujardin, Britain’s joint-most decorated female Olympian and a wider legend of her sport, sensationally withdrew from what would have been her fourth Games following the release of a video showing her “making an error of judgement” involving a horse.
It was the sort of news flash that you had to read twice just to be sure that it was not all some mistake. But no, with barely 72 hours until the greatest sporting show will begin with an opening ceremony down the River Seine, one of Team GB’s superstars has announced that she is out.
And she is not injured. She is not sick. A four-year-old video has just been handed into her governing body, the International Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI), which is deemed so serious that she cannot continue in the Olympics even while an investigation is ongoing.
Several sources have told Telegraph Sport that the incident is related to animal welfare.
“I am deeply ashamed,” said Dujardin. “What happened was completely out of character and does not reflect how I train my horses or coach my pupils, however there is no excuse.” Dujardin did not elaborate much further, leaving Team GB desperately seeking more facts before responding to what had been genuinely bombshell news.
At Great Britain’s specialist performance lodge in Clichy earlier on Tuesday, one of the favourite phrases had been the “one team” mantra. This concept is repeatedly stressed to athletes and staff in the absolute conviction that they are all strengthened – and that there is actually a performance gain – in seeing themselves as one team rather than a disparate collection of sports.
It is why something like Sir Andy Murray’s willing integration into the Olympic Village is so welcomed and athletes from different sports are encouraged to get to know each other at places like their bespoke performance lodge and the big pre-Games kitting-out operation. And so Team GB cannot on the one hand expect athletes to take inspiration from the success of compatriots in other sports and at the same time not be immune to the reverberations of losing one of their most familiar and popular characters.
A triple Olympic champion, who is one of 10 mums in the British party following the birth last year of daughter Isabella, Dujardin is regarded as an authentic hero inside her sport and the end of her Paris dream is a huge blow.
Welfare concerns cannot be ignored but timing raises questions
Her abrupt withdrawal, delivered with a 137-word statement, also prompts numerous questions.
Dujardin has already admitted being at fault and, while the gravity of her actions is unknown and must now be decided by the FEI, we can only wonder what prompted what she insists was an aberration. It will also raise questions about the wider treatment of horses within her sport and whether what might be deemed normal out of sight of a camera is quite the same once a video risks being leaked into the public domain.
There is of course also the very obvious question of the timing and how a video that is apparently four years old should be coming into the hands of the sport’s governing body at this precise stage of an Olympic cycle. No horse welfare issue should ever be swept under the carpet but it barely needs saying that the timing could not have been worse for Dujardin or indeed Team GB, for whom she must have been among the contenders to carry the Great Britain flag at Friday’s opening ceremony.
The wider British staff and team of now 326 athletes will of course now move on quickly. Unexpected things happen in sport, for good or for bad, and the narrative always evolves. That process is also always quickened by live action, let alone the effective reality of 40 different sports hosting their version of a world championship over the next 17 days. Even so, on the grand richter scale of pre-Olympic shocks, this is unprecedented.
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