Guest columnist of the week is Dirk Willem Rosie, editor-in-chief of Dutch equestrian newspaper De Paardenkrant and website Horses.nl. For 13 years Rosie worked as editor at De Hoefslag before taking up a job at the KWPN headquarters in 1994. He was head of communications and editor-in-chief of the official KWPN magazine In de Strengen. In 2006 he founded his own newspaper Het Sportpaard, which merged with De Paardekrant. Rosie also authored the book "Het Dressuurpaard - Exterieur, Beweging, Ziel" which has been translated into English ("Selecting the Dressage Horse") and German("Dressurpferde in Bewegung, Alles was Sieger Ausmacht").
Rosie's column "Climate Change" first appeared on Horses.nl on 11 September 2015. Reprinted here with kind permission
Climate Change
“You will write a nice article about this”, I was sometimes told when I used to work at the KWPN and there was, once again, fuss about something. ‘No’, I said. ‘Even if we would pay a couple of thousand for an ad campaign, I cannot talk right what is wrong.’ It was the old-fashioned notion that you can solve a problem by means of communication. There’s nothing to solve, things are as they are.
Fine if the wrong is being exposed. If the nosebands are too tight, they should be loosened. But for some, it can be very annoying when negative news goes viral on the Internet. We live in the world of filming smartphones, of Peta and Epona, of people who go nuts on Internet forums. Riders, officials, equestrian organizations, everyone making a mistake is at the mercy of the madness of the internet crowd.
Advice: do not make a mistake. Especially not in dressage. A disqualification due to excessive whip use in driving – like last month at the World Championships in Breda – really doesn’t become a global issue. No: whether the trainer of a Dutch dressage rider has or has not had a conversation with a steward in the warming up area in Aachen, of course needs to be excessively sifted through. Including an unsolicited statement by the German FN.
Initially it seemed Eva Bitter also took a misstep. At the Bundeschampionat, an overzealous vet noted the jumping rider was riding around with a peculiar tongue construction. Doctor Tönnies made a lot of noise on the St-Georg website, but from a statement by the FN, we could deduce that Tönnies had unjustly been naming and shaming. By then, the virtual crowd had already poured a truck load of garbage on top of Eva.
We have to learn to live with the fact that medieval witch hunt has virtually resurrected.The storms on the Internet will not subside. The climate has changed irreversibly. The horse was always more than enough reason to act in the most animal friendly way, but now the Internet crowds joined.
Federations can only do one thing: speak with one voice. They don’t, actually. Especially the German FN likes to react – with needless press statements and its own, different from the FEI doping regulations – to the German gut feeling. An inexhaustible source of unnecessary negative publicity.
Stewards should apply regulations as strict as it may. The rest is simple: a rule has or has not been violated, a punishment has or has not been administered. The FEI and all its members only need to have their backs straight to weather the storms.
-- by Dirk Willem Rosie