PARIS — In a previous role, James Hood was responsible for ensuring swim teams made it from here to there on time, ready to compete.
“Let me tell you, pack a hockey bag full of swimming suits and goggles and caps, totally easy,” said the former general manager of Swim Alberta.
He’s now the high performance director for Equestrian Canada, charged with getting 12 riders, horses and grooms, three veterinarians, equine physiotherapists and chef d’equipes, a couple of managers and himself to these Olympics.
“We have a few more logistics,” he chuckled.
Even when all goes according to plan and there are no issues, there are still issues, starting with the transport of those equine athletes by airplane from North America to Liege, Belgium, where their first stop is a four-star, airport hotel, the Horse Inn.
“They get a lovely stall and stable that is bio-secure and bio-safe,” said Hood. “Their cleaning process is world-standard on trying to minimize contagion transfer. Stables are hosed down with a germicide. It’s no different than your Holiday Inn cleaning your remote control and everything in the room so that you are safe in it.”
Indeed. That paper ring around the toilet has saved a lot of lives.
“Just as the human world went through COVID in the 2020s, the equine world also had an outbreak of something called EHV1, and it actually paused shows around the world for a period during COVID,” continued Hood. “Bio-security and temperature-taking and monitoring is important. We’ve got 17 countries with teams here. You’re putting horses all over the world, so if you have an issue and one horse gives it to the entire herd and they took it to their home community, you can impact domestic herds all over.”
Horse health is a top priority, and on Friday, one day before Paris 2024 competition began in Versailles, Equestrian Canada announced a line-up change spurred by the fact that Jill Irving’s first mount, Delacroix II, was not sound enough to compete.
Anticipating the problem, Equestrian Canada had already gone to their stable of athletes, reaching out to Ariana Chia, a Winnipeg native now based in Florida. Her mount wasn’t in Europe, so the horse/rider combination couldn’t get here in time. Digging deeper into the bullpen, they went to the sixth-ranked rider, Denielle Gallagher, another Florida resident. She tried hard but couldn’t arrange the veterinary paperwork necessary to get her horse onto a plane out of Miami fast enough to ensure her mount would have time to recover from the transatlantic flight and be in top form.
Flying is hell on some horses, who have to stand up the whole time. Yes, they sleep standing up. But this isn’t first class, with its cushy seats and eye masks and champagne and Ambien. Neigh, this is the cargo hold, with another horse beside you on the same wooden pallet, taking up the arm rest and leaving an unspeakable mess on the floor.
“Much like humans, some horses fly really well, and some horses don’t,” said Hood. “It’s a dehydration (issue). There is water on the plane, there are hay nets, there is some feed. But the important piece is when they de-plane, making sure they have body function again. So my happy moment is when you go, ‘oh it peed, it went to the bathroom.’ Hurrah. You’re looking for them to have reacclimatized and restart function.”
So what makes a horse a bad flier?
“They don’t want to drink, don’t want to move, they might have a temperature,” said Hood. “It can impact their sleeping patterns.”
A tired horse will not make hay at the Olympic Games. So that is taken seriously.
“Like it would be for younger athletes, the barns here at the Olympic Games have kind of a curfew for lights out, so that horses can get rest time,” said Hood.
Equestrian Canada wound up going to the seventh horse in the selection rank, which just happened to be another Jill Irving mount, Genesis. The horse was already across the pond, because Irving had been competing on Genesis prior to the Games. What’s more, both horses used the same groom and had the same owner. Bonus. It did mean that Irving, 61, fell into the fourth or reserve spot and won’t necessarily make her Olympic debut after all, which is horse hockey. But that’s the way it goes.
“We had to re-rank because Jill on Delacroix was essentially the second-ranked athlete on the team but Jill on Genesis would move into the reserve spot, the fourth-place position. Camille Bergeron and Chris von Martels each moved up one spot.”
And if you think that was a complicated bit of horsing around, consider shipping a bunch of animals out of Miami or New York or Calgary to Belgium. But don’t try it out of Toronto, because they don’t ship horses anymore, do they? They do not.
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Anyway, horse flights are complicated. And yes, the horses need passports, of a sort. They also need deep pockets, and they don’t wear pants, so somebody else is paying through the nose.
“Normally, a round-trip ticket from Miami to Liege, if you’re using a shared pallet, is about $40,000 US.”
Each. That’s all in, with medical screenings, veterinary paperwork, some limited transport at both ends of the trip. Just the flight itself is about $15,000 US each way, but again, it is never a matter of simply fork-lifting a horse onto a pallet and into the belly of a 747 and hitting the friendly skies. The horse needs the accompaniment of a groom, for instance, to ensure its in-flight welfare. There are companies like Overseas Horse Services in Calgary and Horseflight in New Jersey that provide horse transport and professional grooms.
The horse also needs to get over its jet lag, as it were, and Equestrian Canada held three pre-Games staging camps for its athletes. One of them was in the picturesque town of Lignieres, three hours south of Paris. It had a great complex with training rings and on-site accommodations. The French government footed some of the bill for Canada’s stay and the community was very welcoming. One local farmer who had done his first hay cut donated all of it to Team Canada, and the downtown floral arrangement was re-designed to look like the Canadian flag. This was no one-horse town.
And now that the Games are underway, the organization’s focus is on day-to-day performance. They’re hoping for a top-eight finish in eventing, increased point totals in dressage to show the program is moving forward, and Hood is convinced the jumping team has podium potential. Others would see them as the dark horse.
But they have done all they can — and it is a considerable effort — to get their human and equine athletes from here and there to here on time; happy, healthy and ready to compete.