arggh in need of a rant!! first of all i am going to congratulate all the members of team GB, the 5 riders, the owners, trainers and professionals who helped keep the horses on form and the thousands of us who supported the effort for the silver medal what a wonderful result for the sport!
its fair to say that equestrian sports aren't mainstream they dont feature daily in the tabloids and aren't plastered across the TV disrupting normal programming!! (although i think they should be :D ) but how can the media be so bl**dy ignorant!? i was at work this afternoon after the medal was won and had various radio stations on and the news of the medal was mentioned a few times but it was always 'zara phillips and team GB' 'the GB eventing team which featured zara phillips' 'well done to the GB team featuring zara phillips' of course she attracts attention because of who she is and her family and this is to be expected but there was not a mention of the other 4 members in the team once! zara showed this weekend exactly why she was picked for the team and not because of her name because of her dedication to the sport, her ability to keep cool under pressure and her obvious talent, but it would have been nice if they could have acknowledged the rest of the team effort - would it have been mentioned atall if zara was not in the team!? . . . this to me only reinforces to the publics general perception that she was picked because of her royal background and she should ride on home soil, ect ect - this was the first thing to annoy me today.
the second was seeing a photograph soon after the jumping on a newspapers website with a quick write up - cannot for the life of me find it now! but it was a picture of mary king upon finishing her showjumping round congratulating archie - the caption read something like this - an emotional zara congratulates highkingdom on helping her to olympic silver - HELLO WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER FOUR!!?? how can we raise the profile of our sport if the medi only acknowledge 1/5th of the effort? but how ignorant can you be to not even get the correct picture/name of horse and rider? simple mistake or complete ignorance?
as im writing this im trying not to make it sound like im dissing zara, in fact compleetly the opposite but why can the media not acknowledge a team effort - she completley held her own this weekend and showed those even within the sport that she was not chosen because of her name and that the selectors were right to put her in the first team - but it was a team effort afterall - the general public probably wouldnt even know how many were in the team let alone who they are!! this is such a great achievment shouldnt we be using this as a spring board for our sport and using the all the atheletes to promote it.
and lastly!! THIS. there aren't even words for it! what a snobby journalist from such a high profile paper - this shouldnt not even be allowed to be printed! this journalist has a complete disregard for the sport and the time and effort that goes into producing these horses - how can a paper print such a biased and snobby review of an event that has helped the GB medal effort!?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/equestrianism/9436375/London-2012-Olympics-the-fabulous-quiet-of-the-eventing-arena.html#
RANT OVER!! sorry guys! on my soap box tonight!! well done if you read all of that really pointless post so you need'nt have read it but sometime you just need to write it all down to get it out of your system!!
You Can't Expect A Horse To Read Your Every thought, Without first Teaching Him The Alphabet . . .