Controversy strikes the World Cup Final; Show Jumping leader McClain Ward eliminated

For two days, McClain Ward and his Olympic medal winning mare, Sapphire, had been in the lead at the World cup final in show jumping. But after a vet check was performed, the mare was found to be hypersensitive in one of her legs and was disqualified from the competition after the team had won. The vets conducted a thermo-imaging scan of the mare's leg two times and deemed it to be normal, as well as testing her legs for any sign of pain, but after talking with eachother the vets decided that the scans were abnormal and that the team was to be disqualified.


McClain Ward and Sapphire

Hypersensitivy can be caused by normal things that a horse would expirence everyday, such as insect bites or inflammation of the skin due to irritants. However, riders can also make their horses legs hypersensitive on purpose to make them jump higher and be more careful not to hit the jumps, and it is becoming more and more popular in the world of show jumping, and in cases such as this you wonder if McClain was singled out because of his history with hypersensitivity in competition.

In 1999 McClain was suspended from competing for 8 months for having allegedly put plastic chips in his horses boots, in order to encourage hypersensitivity. He denied the accusation, but served the sentence anyway. Alex McLin, the secretary general of the Fédération Equestre Internationale, said that no horse was “singled out because of any incident in the past.”  McLin added, “There is no evidence of malpractice in this case, but it remains our duty to protect horses from competing if there is any level of abnormal sensitivity involved and in the event of doubt to err on the side of caution.”

Tiffany Foster and Victor

 Recently, in this years London Olympics, a canadian show jumper named Tiffany Foster was disqualified after a vet found a nick in the horses cornet band, which was "like a paper cut". The horse had been exercised and jumped that morning and was showing no signs of pain due to the "injury". The horse was deemed hypersensitive anyway.The vets did not check for any signs of lameness in the horses in these cases, and the riders are unable to appeal the cases due to the rules set by the FEI. She had broken her back before the 2008 olympics and was unable to ride. She was thrilled when she was asked to ride in this years olympic games, only to be disqualified.

Eric Lamaze, whose gold medal horse Hickstead collapsed from a heart attack and died at a World Cup show in Verona in 2011, said it was time to take a s"hard look at the FEI's rules on hypersensitivity in jumpers."How can five people poking at a horse's coronary band declare him unfit to compete? How can they ruin someone's Olympic dream?"