BRITAIN’S stock of Olympic gold, silver and bronze rose in Athens yesterday when Leslie Law, the three-day event rider, was upgraded to gold by a panel of lawyers and a judge three days after his sport had finished. The tribunal awarded Pippa Funnell an individual bronze, and moved Great Britain up to silver in the team contest.
This followed a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sports, sitting in the Holiday Inn in Athens, that stripped Bettina Hoy and Germany of their individual and team gold medals because of a technical infringement by Hoy. It clouds rather than clarifies the judgment of sports, and it makes a “Horlicks”— to use an equestrian term — of the International Equestrian Federation (FEI).
Law was not in Athens yesterday. He was in the saddle in middle England, about to showjump a novice horse at Solihull.
“I’m a bit emotional, really,” he said immediately after steering six-year-old Diamond Hall Alice around the course. “I had tried to put it out of my head. Hearing the news from our team manager, Yogi Breisner, by mobile just as I was warming Alice up didn’t do very much for my round of showjumping, I can tell you . . .”
The self-effacing man from Hereford, raised in a council house, has risen through effort to renting his own yard, selecting the grey Irish gelding Shear L’Eau, and L’Eau’s full brother Shear H20 for his sponsors and the horses’ owners by trusting his judgment when they were two-year-olds, and schooling them to this peak.
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At a stroke that has taken 22 years in the making, Law is the ultimate victor in his sport. And this destroys the image of eventing as a sport for the privileged. Anyone in the arena at Markopoulo, the Olympic equestrian centre, as midnight approached on Wednesday would have seen how easy, and how difficult it is to establish harmony with a horse of Shear L’Eau’s ability and temperament.
As the delayed medal ceremonies concluded, with the wrong medal around his master’s neck, “Stan”, as the horse is called, kicked like a bronco. As they engineered a clear cross-country round the day before, we saw Law tugging and teasing his horse, trying to rein an exuberant animal used to mightier exams over more daunting obstacles than were prepared for this Olympian test.
It is no fault of the Italian designer that such a course was set: eventing has to stay in the Olympic Games, it has to attract 14 countries, and it cannot risk killing horses or riders by providing a test that would be too high for most of them.
“As Brits, we would have benefited from a bigger challenge across country,” Law says. “But in the overall picture, the sport must come first, and we have to build with responsibility towards the world of eventing.”
The Olympic champion, having partied on Friday “to celebrate what we had achieved, not anything we might be given”, possibly had good reason to put off Solihull, except that Law had two students he is grooming for eventing competing there.
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They had cared for his other horses while he and Trina Lightwood, his fiancée, were in Athens. It was his “duty” to support those young riders, and to compete two novice horses maybe four years down the line, will be among his choices to defend the Olympic title.
The controversial ruling meant Hoy, whose mood swung from tears of despair to ecstasy in the arena on Wednesday night, had lost everything. “I’m sorry for Bettina,” said Law.
With one eye laughing for Leslie Law, and one weeping for the spirit of sport, I fear where arbitration is leading. Sport should be decided by sportsmen and women, on the field of action.