Olmps

proved the most enthusiastic. . In the late eighteenth century the centre of world dressage was the court of Versailles, where dressage master François Robichon embellished a strictly utilitarian military discipline with something of the artistry of the modern sport.. In the nineteenth century the focus shifted to Germany, where dressage remained integral to military horsemanship.. Indeed, proponents of classical dressage were not delighted when their discipline became an organised sport at the Olympics of 1912..The schism between competitive and non-competitive dressage continues to this day..

Eventing was preceded by endurance races for cavalry officers, the earliest recorded instance being a race from Vienna to Wiener Neustadt in 1687.. In the late nineteenth century, endurance racing took off in the American west, with the Pony Express, cow herders and the US cavalry all providing competitors for riding marathons. . German and Austrian officers tested each other in a race held in 1895 between Vienna and Berlin, a distance of more than 330 miles, while in France cross-country cavalry dashes were popular amongst the officer class..A combination of endurance racing, steeplechasing and all the other equine disciplines – a test of the all-round horsemanship expected of cavalry officers – was held

in France in 1902. .This Championnat du Cheval des Armes

proved a massive success with the cavalry fraternity, and the format was instantly adopted across Europe.. Like dressage, it made its debut at the Olympics in 1912..

Show jumping, as the name implies, has less practical origins.. Equipped with the new hunter saddle for English-style riding, nineteenth-century fox-hunters took great pleasure in leaping over walls, brooks and all manner of natural obstacles in pursuit of their quarry.. Jumping competitions were a natural progression..The Royal Dublin Society staged contests for wide and high leaps in 1865, and in 1883 American show jumping made its debut at Madison Square Gardens in New York.. Something close to this style of competition was seen in 1907 with the inaugural International Horse Show at Olympia in London.. Combined with dressage and eventing, it would form the basis of the Olympic sport that debuted in 1912..

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Game On: Equestrianism Basics

Dressage

In the dressage, rider and horse have to perform a

series of closely defined movements, displaying mastery in the trot, walk and canter as well as more complex moves like the half-pass, in which the horse moves diagonally.. Points are awarded by a panel of judges..

At the Olympics, team and individual events occur simultaneously over three rounds of competition: the Grand Prix serves as the whole team version and the first round of the individual competition. .Teams count their three best scores, while the top twenty-five rider-horse combinations go through to the next round. The Grand Prix Special is the second individual qualifying round.. Competitors perform a slightly shorter version of the Grand Prix movements and the top fifteen progress to the final round..This is the Grand Prix Freestyle, in which the leading riders perform an original sequence of moves set to music..

The judges score each individual movement from zero to ten, and add in a difficulty factor..They also produce a score (called a collective mark) for four key qualities of the competitor’s performance: the freedom and regularity of the horse’s paces; the impulsion of the horse; the submission of the horse to the rider; and the posture of the rider.. In the freestyle, marks are also awarded for interpretation and artistry..

Show Jumping

In the show jumping, horse and rider must complete a

course of around fifteen fences within a time limit, but not against the clock.. Penalty points are accumulated for a variety of faults, and the rider or team with the lowest number of faults wins.. At the Olympics there are five rounds of show jumping, grouped into three..

Round 1. This round, over a short course, is the first qualifying round of the individual event and also determines the starting order in the team event..

Rounds 2 and 3. Both of these count towards individual qualification..The top 45 riders go through to the final round.. Scores from round 2 also contribute to team scores; the cumulative scores after round 3 determine the team gold..

Rounds 4 and 5. The 45 riders who made it through rounds 2 and 3 now face further rounds to determine the individual medals.. The field is whittled down to 20 for the final round and the lowest cumulative score wins..

Faults in show jumping

Obstacle knocked down: 4

First disobedience of horse: 4

Feet in the water jump: 4

First fall of rider: 4

Second fall of rider: 8

Second disobedience of horse: elimination

Fall of horse: elimination

Exceeding the time limit: elimination

Eventing

Formerly a three-day competition, now spread over

four days, eventing begins with two days of dressage, followed by a day of cross-country and a day of show jumping..The dressage and show jumping phases are very similar to the pure dressage and show jumping competitions.. In the cross-country, riders must complete an obstacle course about 5..7km long, with up to 45 jumps; they must complete the course within a set time and accumulate as few faults as possible..Team and individual competitions run concurrently, with an additional jumping test at the end to determine the individual classifications..

Scoring is complex.. Dressage is marked in the same way as the stand-alone event, then mathematically converted to penalty

NOT FOR THE FAINTHEARTED: EVENTING At MELBOURNE 1956

points – riders try to accumulate as low a score as possible across the three events. . In both the jumping and cross-country an optimum and a maximum time for completing the course are set.. Riders who finish outside the maximum time are eliminated and for every second they go over the optimum time further penalty points are collected.. Penalty points are collected in show jumping in the normal way.. In the cross-country all falls lead to elimination, refusal and disobedience score twenty penalty points and five instances of disobedience (or three at the same fence) lead to elimination.. It is, after all, a sport rooted in military discipline..

The Finer Points

Swing is the Thing: Dressage

As Duke Ellington put it, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it

ain’t got that swing..’ Despite its stuffy image and the ramrod backs of the riders, dressage is all about swing and rhythm, or as the Germans more onomatopoeically put it, the Schwung.. Horse and

rider should move with ease, grace, suppleness and precision: hesitations, imbalance and shuffling are poor form..

Much of a dressage routine involves horse and rider effortlessly moving between different stride patterns – walk, trot and canter

– while displaying technical variants of each of these gaits and performing diagonal movements, like the half-pass, where the horse moves forward and sideways simultaneously.. Look, too, for the Pir- ouette, in which horse and rider will rotate through 360 degrees..

Cross-country

Though the competition is built around an optimal

time for the course, riding flat out is virtually impossible: all riders will need to decelerate and show caution in tackling the tougher obstacles.. Look out for horses tiring towards the end of the course: clipping obstacles, skidding on landing and heaviness of movement all suggest an animal at its limits..

Faults and Fences: Show Jumping

The fences in show jumping are higher and wider than

those in eventing.. Don’t be fooled by the TV pictures – they are gigantic, even if you are a horse. .The riders must balance speed against accuracy of jumping – at the highest levels even a single fault can be disastrous..The best will be those that prepare the horse for each jump, approaching at the right angle and speed, while adjusting the mount’s stride to find the right take-off point..

Equestrianism Goes to the Olympics

Equestrian events debuted at Paris 1900 but then

went absent until the modern form of the sport was defined by the 1912 Stockholm Olympics..The Swedish court was anxious to bring the sport back to the Games, and the campaigning work of Count Clarence von Rosen, Master of the Horse to the King of Sweden, paid off.. Dressage, eventing and show jumping were contested at Stockholm – albeit only by serving military commissioned officers.. Sweden swept the medal board..

compete, and the Swedes duly won the dressage gold..Two weeks later he was demoted.The IOC and the sport’s ruling body reacted by stripping the Swedes of their medal and, thankfully, abandoning the officers-only rule..The leading Mexican show jumper Humberto Mariles won gold in London.. In later life he shot a man in a road rage incident and served five years in jail, only to be re-imprisoned for drug trafficking in France.. He was found dead in his cell..

The post-war years were the final flourish for the military men..

Colonel Harry Llewelyn and his ride Foxhunter were the

heroes in 1952, clinching an amazing last-minute comeback and gold medal for a British show jumping team that had looked totally beaten..At the same Games,the Danish rider Lis Hartel,on Jubilee, took silver in the dressage, becoming the first woman to win an equestrian medal at the Games – just as remarkably, she had suffered polio as a child and was paralysed below the knees..

Send in the cavalry

Up to 1948,cavalry officers were the stars of Olympic equestrianism, and some were starrier than most.The show jumping in Los Angeles 1932 was won by Japanese cavalrymanTakeichi Nishi on Uranus,a victory that made him such a celebrity that for a while he became a member of the Hollywood set around Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. He would later serve as a tank commander, and died in the defence of Iwo

Jima in 1945. At the Berlin1936 Games Lieutenant Konrad Freiherr von

Wangenheim, a member of the German eventing team, fell and broke a collar bone in the steeplechase. He clambered back on to his horse, jumped the remaining 32 obstacles, and presented himself for the following day’s show jumping with his arm in a sling.Wangenheim then had another severe fall: his horse threw him and toppled on to him, but he still managed, in great pain, to complete the course and secure a gold medal for Germany in front of 100,000 spectators.

As with Nishi, the war was the ruin of him. After being captured on the Eastern front,Wangenheim was imprisoned for more than a decade and died in a Russian POW camp in 1953, just days before his planned release. He was found hanged.

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In 1956 equestrianism achieved the unique feat of becoming the only Olympic event to have been held, in total, in a different country from the rest of the Games. .Australia’s strict quarantine laws made the equestrian competitions a logistical nightmare, so Stockholm was used as the venue..

In recent years, Olympic equestrianism has been riven by doping scandals and conflicts with animal welfare groups. . In

2004 Cian O’Connor and his horseWaterford Crystal were

stripped of their show jumping gold medal (Ireland’s only gold of the Athens Games) after the horse tested positive for a banned drug. .The problem of doping appeared endemic when, on the eve of the show jumping competition in Beijing in 2008, horses from the Irish, Norwegian, Brazilian and German teams failed their drug tests and were excluded from the event. .A year later, the German equine sports federation went a stage further and dismissed all of their

Olympic teams after show jumper Marco Kutscher confessed to the press that his horse had been doped at Beijing..

The welfare of the horses has always been a contentious issue and it looks like it will be again this time round.. In the run-up to London 2012 animal rights activists have called for a boycott of the equestrian events..Their campaign began when a video depicting the dressage training and warm-up technique rollkur went viral.. Swedish rider Patrik Kittel was seen drawing his horse’s neck round and down so that its nose was touching its chest..While many within the sport consider this a perfectly legitimate and cruelty-free form of training, viewers were alarmed at the state of the horse’s tongue (which went blue) and Kittel received many death threats..

FENCING

28 July–5 August 2012

ExCel Arena

Athletes: 212 | Golds up for grabs: 10

Olympic presence

Men, 1896–present; women 1924–present.

Olympic Format

There are individual contests for épée, foil and sabre

for both men and women.. Men contest a team foil and a team sabre competition, women team foil and team épée..

Contenders:

In the women’s events all eyes will be upon the Italian

Valentina Vezzali, who has won the last five golds in the foil.. The sabre should prove a fierce battle between the winner in 2008, American Mariel Zagunis, and the young Ukrainian star Olga Kharlan.. In the men’s events look out for China’s Lei Sheng and Japan’s Yuki Ogta in the foil, Germany’s Joerg Fiedler in the épée, and Nicolas Limbach in the sabre..

Past Champions:

Italy: 45 | France: 41 | Hungary: 34

Why Watch Fencing?

It is hard not to see competitive fencing through the

lenses of literature or film..The duel has been a staple dramatic device from Shakespeare through popular historical novels such as The Count of Monte Cristo to the swashbuckling movies of Douglas

THE FLASHING BLADE: MEN’S FOIL FINAL, Tokyo 1964

Fairbanks Jr. . and Errol Flynn. .And therein lies the problem: fencing’s compressed and technical artistry can look colourless against the implausible flourishes of big-screen swordplay..To see the sport properly requires a recalibration of the mind.. Fencing is a European martial art: the stylish and refined remnant of an aristocratic code of masculine conduct – but not so refined that the dangers have been entirely eliminated, nor a code so strict as to prevent gamesmanship and cheating.. Once the eye has adjusted to this extraordinary form of ritualised combat and recognised its sparse beauty, the Three Musketeers will look like a music-hall novelty turn..

The Story of Fencing

Europe’s medieval nobilities were a warrior class and

their wills were enforced their will at the point of a sword..After the arrival of gunpowder, what kept the sword in business was its role as a marker of status: who could and couldn’t publicly bear arms