29/08/2019
Turmoil in an environment littered with serious horse welfare problems and too many deaths. Her name was Ulla De Luc and she was 11 years old. On 18 August Ulla collapsed and died minutes after crossing the finish line of a 120 km race run at the crazy average speed of almost 28 kph. She was ridden by Ghanim Said Salim Al Owaisi (UAE): it was one of those competitions organised for the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum festival in the European endurance championship which took place at Euston Park. Following this episode, Endurance GB opened an investigation and suspended Alexandra Tennant, Welfare Director, who made a decision to resign from the BOD a few days later and made the letter public. The letter states, among other things: “As Welfare Director for Endurance GB I find it completely unacceptable that this horse legally could compete at these speeds on British soil – this is not the sport I joined nor one I want to be in anyway associated with. I will be writing to the FEI to display my revulsion and insist that the new FEI endurance rules proposed by the Temporary Endurance Committee for speed caps and rider competency should be supported and immediately adopted on grounds of horse welfare. I would support lifetime bans for riders and trainers who have been proven to significantly contribute to the demise of their loyal steed. We cannot sit back and watch these deaths continue”. We were stunned by one of the comments under the post, presumably written by a horse owner: “I have two horses who participated in Euston, a person of our stewardship saw Ulla De Luc pass at the assistance points, the rider did not stop to let drink his horse. On the last point of assistance the horse wanted to drink but from a reindeer movement he prevented it to continue his way”. Miss Tennants also states that large amounts of prize money were on offer with £5k going to the individual winner and £32k to the winning team. In the next few days we will get back to the subject of endurance and the very serious problems known to insiders for years. (picture taken from a video on Clean Endurance FB page: https://www.facebook.com/cleanendurance/videos/489309344968252/)