Against the repeated scandal represented by the absence of horse racing at the Olympic Games since their creation in 1896, Paris has done nothing. There will still be no horse racing at the 2024 Olympics. It is an insult to antiquity that the use of the “Olympic” brand for a sporting event where none of the events that were, from the 4th century BC, the most prestigious.
When we know that the modern Olympic Games have long hosted show jumping and dressage events, we ask ourselves the question: why so much contempt, so much injustice? The answer is simple: because of the bet. Money is dirty, gambling is naughty, and gambling is sinful. This moralism could still be understood at the end of the 19th century, but today where all sports are used as supports for bets, it is nonsense, an anachronism to which Paris, the only city in the world endowed with three intra-racecourses -muros, could have ended, with a little will.
Last Sunday, the Prize of the President of the Republic was run in Vincennes. A title that sounds like a desperate plea to said president who, to my knowledge, has never been to a racetrack. It is however one of the rare sporting places where he would not be jeered at, if he went there. Because racegoers know how to behave. They are part of a long and rich history that is not the one that caricatures and prejudices tell.
anti-horse hatred
France has 250 racecourses, pillars of an industry, sorry, of a flourishing “horse-racing industry”, two centuries old, which has withstood all economic crises, recovered from all wars, circumvented all censorships, and continues to defy the appetites of the mafias, the state and charlatans of all stripes. It was in France that trotting races were invented and the pari-mutuel betting that keeps them alive, without state aid, without subsidies, but with the money of bettors, owners, and in the name of a common passion. : horse.
Anti-equestrian hatred is not new, it has had its critics, like Maurice Talmeyr (1850-1931), the author of On the turf, talented pamphlet as Edouard Drumont and Léon Daudet knew how to write them. Talmeyr ended up with these gentlemen in the anti-Semitic dustbins of journalism. A random ? Not sure.
In equestrian sport, the Paris Olympics offered a chance that passed under his nose. Other opportunities will arise, we will eventually understand that it is time to take an interest in the most ecological sport of all, and the most virtuous in terms of social ties, non-violence, acculturation and morality. . Yes, of morality, because the bet is not an invention of the devil, it is an act of high pedagogical significance, as Emmanuel Kant demonstrated in his Critique of pure reason: “Often someone expresses his propositions with such confident and intractable audacity that he seems to have banished all fear of error altogether. A bet makes him think.”
It seems that horse racing does not make the caciques of the Olympic Games and the sports department of the Paris town hall think. Hypocrites, uneducated or spineless, to wipe away the tears of the 10 million French racegoers, they took out a paper handkerchief from their educational toolbox: the Olympic flame will have the right to pass through the Enghien racecourse and the center of Grosbois training. It will pass to taunt the people of the races who will perhaps ask them why the racehorse is not entitled to the Olympic Games?
The Olympic flame, passing through Enghien and Grosbois, will not be able to cauterize the wound of indifference and contempt from which races suffer today. She won’t pay for the mess.
Against all odds, and for as long as it lasts, we will continue to go to the races. And strongly that there is no more oil, that we go there on horseback.