Olympic hurdler Max Kuehner is accused of “rapping,” a practice that forces a horse to jump higher after being hit in the legs with an iron bar.
New allegations of equestrian abuse have cast a shadow over the Paris Olympics, after Max Kuehner, who competes for Austria in the show jumping event, was accused of kick your competition horse’s legs with a bar.
This practice (of hitting the horse’s legs during a jump, forcing the animal to jump higher — was banned in Germany in May 2023. It is known as “rapping” and its illegality on German territory led the Munich public prosecutor to accuse the Austrian athlete, who is ranked third in the world in this sport, of violating German animal welfare laws, The Telegraph reports.
The Austrian Equestrian Federation denies any wrongdoing and guarantees that the athlete is fit to compete at Versailles in individual and team jumping events. “We can confirm, based on everything we have observed during the years of working with Max, that the way his horses are kept, trained and presented is of the highest quality,” the governing body told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Kuehner had already faced accusations of animal cruelty in 2008, when, through an anonymous letter, he was accused of using a wire to make his horse jump with greater precision. At that time, the animal’s training method, although controversial, was not considered sufficient reason to punish him.
A British Olympic dressage champion was banned from the Paris Olympics on Wednesday after a video emerged of her whipping a horse at least 24 times, “as if it were an elephant in an animal circus,” according to the description in the complaint that led to her dismissal. It was an “error of judgment,” Charlotte Dujardin admitted.
Horse training. British champion Charlotte Dujardin banned from Olympics for horse abuse
The viewing of the images led the International Federation of Equestrian Sports (FEI) to ban the athlete, with immediate effect. “At the time, my client thought that such behaviour would be normal. After all, she [Dujardin] “She is an Olympic champion… who am I to question her?” the lawyer was quoted as saying by The Guardian. However, “afterwards the young woman asked other people if this was normal and they told her not to talk about it.”
Source: Observadora
