Me and EN’s Sally Spickard in Paris – the culmination of an awful lot of work and dreaming.
I’ve been home from the Paris Olympics for just over a week now, and I’ll admit that that week has felt a bit like I’ve been sleepwalking. But now, with the dust settling and the image of Tom Cruise’s little legs sailing through the Stade de France nearly washed out of my prefrontal cortex, I think I’m ready to start delving into the Olympics that was — for better and for worse. This’ll be a two-parter, because I have too many thoughts and too many opinions, and for that, I am not sorry.
On getting my moment
This was my first crack at an Olympics, and one that’s felt so long in the making. In 2012, I managed to get a single cheap-seat ticket to see the eventing finale, for which I caught a 5am train so I could watch every second of the horse inspection, and at which I felt a special thrill of pride because I was, at the time, working a few days a week for Marietta Fox-Pitt, mother of competitor William. In 2016, I was working a summer job for an equestrian PR company at the very start of my media career, and watched every second of the live stream while reading and re-reading the Olympic rule 40 so that I could ensure that we didn’t misstep in any of our clients’ campaigns. (This is something, by the way, that all PRs really need to be doing, because man, some of them really flirted with getting their athletes disqualified over the course of the Games this year.) In 2021, I provided remote coverage to support our on-site reporter in Tokyo. And this time, I got my moment, both as a photographer and as a journalist.
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve already had to sit through me waxing lyrical about everything that this Games meant to me, so you’ll probably want to skip to the next section for less navel-gazing and a bit more actual recap. But I’ll start here again because – I don’t know, really. Perhaps because I’m having a main character moment; perhaps because this has been something I’ve worked towards for so long that I know I have to afford myself the time and the space to sit with it, and all that it means.
I didn’t necessarily have a conventional, nor an easy, upbringing. But throughout my childhood, and then into my teens, and finally into early adulthood, one thing kept my feet on the ground and my focus on the future: the Olympics. Inexplicably the Olympics, really, because I was the only person in my family who was keen on horses and so I fed the dream myself from the pages of old books and issues of Horse & Pony magazine; with posters of Mary King and VHS tapes of decades-old Games footage.
There was so much that was out my control around me, so much that caused me pain, but dreaming of the Olympics staved off the hopelessness and gave me something to work towards all the time. Did I believe, when I was younger with my head in the clouds, that that would ultimately result in me competing at the Olympics? Totally! Did I go through a tough and odd and tricky adjustment process in my early twenties when I realised that trying to ride full-time didn’t make me happy and that my path towards the Olympic end-goal was actually a bit different? Absolutely. Would I trade any of it? Not a moment.
The Olympics – or what they represented to me – got me to leave home for the first time just after my seventeenth birthday, to move 800 miles away and work for a former Olympian. They got me to move, with just enough money for a one-way ticket, back to the UK when I was nineteen, to balance pursuing an education with working on yards in the sport’s mecca. They kept me focused, kept me moving, kept me believing that any circumstances can be changed if you dream and you work. And in its own way, Paris – the other world I’d always escape to in my brain – did the same thing for me.
When I took a brief break from Olympic dreaming ten years ago, I got a job as an au pair and moved there for a while, to write and create and explore. It was only after Paris that I realised that the mixing of the two worlds – the Olympic dreaming and the writing and creating – were where I’d find the path I was meant to tread.
When it was announced, back in 2015, that Paris was bidding to host the 2024 Games, I made a promise to myself: I would be there, not as a spectator, but as a member of the media. I was still, in 2015, a freelance groom, still trying, and failing, to land pitches with editors who had no reason to open my emails; still wondering if maybe I was barking up the wrong tree and wasn’t ever going to be good enough to get a foot in the door.
But I made that promise. And I’ve kept that promise. The Olympics isn’t about me, obviously. But in a funny sort of way, maybe it is – because maybe the whole point of it is that it’s about all of us, and the way its thread weaves through the unique tapestry of each of our lives.
And so I made a plan to head down to Paris five days earlier than I’d initially planned, to rent myself a sweet little AirBNB in the north of the city, and to give myself an early start at getting into the bubble. There was plenty of tricky stuff going on in my life outside of Paris, and so, I thought, the greatest service I could do myself was to be wholly selfish and really live my Paris 2024 dreams. Days and days of me, and Paris, and a stack of books and a film camera and a chance to reconnect with my own ideas and my own headspace. It’s the best thing I could ever have possibly done, except now I think I want to move back to Paris.
Equestrian media challenge, level: Olympic
Getting accredited as a journalist or a photographer for the Olympics is nearly as hard as getting selected to compete at them, and the process starts years in advance and involves jumping through a few bajillion hoops along the way. Even once you’ve got the coveted accreditation, the challenges are far from over: as a photographer, it’s much harder to break even on the trip, because you’re so limited in how you can sell your images, and everything is a whole heck of a lot more expensive – getting a coffee on site ran me nearly eight Euros per cup, and a sandwich and a cold drink at lunch was nearly twenty every day. Having a car, so we didn’t have to rely on several hours of commuting via public transport each day? A cool thousand dollars (but so, so worth it). Two rooms in the media hotel? At least a few thousand. In a Holiday Inn Express that charged you extra to park. None of it’s cheap, and none of it’s easy – not least the work itself.
The logistical challenges start early: yes, there’s that interminable accreditation process, but that’s actually kind of fun in an anxiety-inducing sort of way, because at that point, the novelty value of paperwork hasn’t worn off. As you get closer to departure, though, and you’ve filled out eight million forms and read and re-read the Photographers’ Undertaking contract two hundred times to ensure you don’t end up in Olympic Jail, and you’ve inventoried and weighed every bit of camera equipment you’re bringing with you so you can pay an eye-watering amount for a customs carnet that allows you to bring your work stuff to France and back again without being charged import duties on it, you do start to wish you had a personal assistant to do all this stuff for you.
And then there’s what that carnet faff adds to your actual journey time: I live just under two hours from the ferry port, so would ordinarily leave the house three hours before departure time. With a carnet stop-off half an hour from the port, which takes any amount of time from ‘an annoying forty minutes’ to ‘just shy of forty years’, depending on your luck, and then another carnet stop-off on the France side, somehow, getting from my house to Paris took me the better part of thirteen hours. It is, I cannot stress this enough, not that far away. But, I told myself at the time, I am on a noble and exciting quest, and I will Instagram it all. While wearing a very serious Cool Runnings t-shirt.
I was feeling very Olympic that day, it’s true.
I’m glad that the Paris Olympics came to me at this point in my career, with eight years of experience under my belt – because I needed to use every bit of it. While I didn’t spend any time in the mixed zone, where media representatives get their post-ride interviews with riders, that had its challenges, too – no riders would come, then lots all at once, or the TV or mainstream media would take so long that by the time they trickled down to specialist press, there was an overlap of competitors or they’d all run out of steam. Sally fought the good fight for us in there, gathering quotes that we could both use to produce long-form analysis pieces later on, while I battled with the unique challenge of shooting the Games.
I’d thought that shooting an Olympics might actually be easier – the photo points would be top-notch, the backgrounds and branding would be clean and considered, allowing for the kind of iconic images you always see at other venues, with an athlete and the rings and nothing much else. But equestrian sport brings with it a level of clutter that you just don’t really get in any other sport.
The arena was full of stuff, and, in any jumping phase, of people, who moved around constantly and didn’t seem to gravitate towards any fixed spot, so if you were lucky enough to find an angle that gave you a clean shot of any fence, you might find it totally blocked by someone at exactly the moment you needed to get the photo of it. The beautiful Paris branding was obscured by a white fence around the perimeter, so getting a shot of the Olympic rings was nearly impossible, and the beautiful backdrop of the Chateau de Versailles had the bright sun directly behind it throughout much of the day.
Remote cameras became one of the most reliable ways to secure a shot – even though remotes are notoriously the most unreliable tool a photographer can use. The Olympics represented my second time ever using them, and they saved my bacon a few times. Here’s Louise Romeike and Caspian 15 of Sweden in the team showjumping round. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
All of us, I think, found it incredibly hard to create clean, creative, exciting imagery as we struggled away in the heat; that feeling was compounded on cross-country day, when we got out on course and simply couldn’t move through the sea of people.
I’m used to being able to move quickly in and out of arenas, to getting action shots and then chase down emotional candids, to slipping into well-placed photo pens to get a full view of entire complexes on cross-country – in Paris, all of that went right out of the window and much of it became a survival game. There was no getting-in-and-out quickly; there was no time or space or room for complacency, either, and you had to constantly reevaluate what your goal shots for the day would be.
And more remotes! This time, I opted to set my camera between the wings on this oxer in the individual final. The pop of red on Boyd Martin’s showcoat makes this shot of him and Fedarman B one of my favourites of that run of remote snaps. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
I didn’t take my favourite photos of my career, as I’d hoped to, but I learned a huge amount and I had the challenge gun put to my head, and, for the most part, I think I managed to dodge the bullet of failure. I think everything this season will feel easier in comparison, but I also think that if I don’t now push myself to the next level, and set myself bigger challenges off the back of the Games, then I’ll have missed a real trick. The Olympics certainly forces us all to use everything we’ve learned along the way, even when it’s really, really tough to do so. And even when there’s always, always some random man in your way.
On getting their moment
I wasn’t on site in Tokyo – instead, I provided remote support from the UK for EN editor Sally Spickard, which felt, probably, much the same as actually being there. The time differences meant that I worked odd hours in solitude, often putting in 18 to 20 hours per day on live updates, web stories, previews, and multi-sport round-ups, and that unique FOMO and disconnect that I felt from my little bedroom south of London actually probably wasn’t eased much by being in Tokyo in the depths of the COVID pandemic.
There would be no hugging friends after they smashed their personal best in the ring; there would be no grabbing dinner with colleagues at the end of the day to debrief on what had played out in the ring. And most notably, there would be no swell of support from an enthusiastic audience to bring those winning moments to life.
A sea of (very loud) supporters at Paris 2024.
Now, three years later, Paris felt like the total opposite of that. I knew that it would be an extraordinary atmosphere – my years of experience of reporting on events in France has shown me that no nation in the world has so much enthusiasm for equestrian sport, and I’ve routinely seen spectators burst into spontaneous, noisy tears at the sight of one of their riding idols.
But even I wasn’t prepared for just how much buoyant, brilliant commotion the French could cause. It sounded as though the grandstands might collapse every time a French competitor rode into the ring, because the 16,000 or so spectators would stamp their feet and clap their hands and roar with an intensity I’ve never witnessed before. On cross-country day, you could close your eyes and guess with absolute accuracy where on course you might find a rider, but especially a French one. And when anyone went well, or won a medal, the support was extraordinary and expansive and almost overwhelmingly emotional to witness.
Kazuma Tomoto, right, is the embodiment of joy on the Paris podium. Photos by Tilly Berendt.
Throughout it all, I was so, so happy that so many of Tokyo’s competitors were there to be able to finally, really get their moment of glory. You could see what it meant to the likes of Laura Collett and Tom McEwen, who had won team gold in Tokyo in front of nobody, most of all; when Germany’s Jessica von Bredow-Werndl defended her Olympic individual dressage title, too, though, it palpably hit her on the podium.
The Japanese team, who had such a tricky Tokyo but were buoyed by a fourth-place finish for Kazuma Tomoto, were as jolly as it’s possible to be when winning bronze in Paris – they joked and laughed and fooled around on the podium, while Kazu, whose wife and young child are still at home in Tokyo, much-missed every day as he trains in the UK, simply smiled and shook his head in disbelief, looking first at his medal, and then up to the sky, scrunching his nose as joy and overwhelm played out across his face.
If you look up the word “finally” in the dictionary, I feel certain you’ll see him there, getting the moment he, and so many of his competitors, were owed. I’m glad for them; I’m glad for us, in the media, getting the real deal experience again; and I’m glad for fans of the sport, who will have been a part of something they’ll never forget in Versailles.
On exposure, for better or for worse
One of the greatest things about the Olympics, whether you’re taking part in the Games in any capacity or following along from afar, is the all-encompassing expansiveness of it. Its moments, macro and micro, are writ large across social media, be that because they’re turned into memes – we all know a little bit more about pole-vaulting thanks to one Frenchman and his, um, particular set of skills – or form the basis of intensive debates, as in the women’s boxing, or become an inspiring rallying point for us all to find some unity in enjoying, such as Simone Biles’ remarkable comeback to the peak of gymnastics.
It’s nearly impossible not to get swept up in it all – not to find yourself forming strong opinions on a sport you’d never watched before turning it on on some random Wednesday afternoon. I’ve thought more about the appeals rule in gymnastics in the last few days than I ever have in my life (which isn’t hard, because I can tell you with some certainty that I’ve never thought about the appeals rule in gymnastics prior to the last few days). I have friends who’ve committed to starting, or returning to, a sport purely because watching it on TV during the Games lit a fire within them. I have other friends who now want to follow along with their newfound sport outside of the Olympics; who’ll be another number boosting a livestream and another ticket sold in a stadium.
What’s the point of all this, though? The point is that the unique exposure of the Olympics is both our most valuable asset and, potentially, our biggest hurdle. And whichever way that skews comes down entirely to us, the equestrian industry as a whole.
A friend of mine, also covering the Paris Games, wryly referred to them as the ‘Welfare Olympics’ midway through our stint, and I think that’s a fair moniker. Just days before the Olympics started, the equestrian world became the main character in the worst possible way thanks to that video of Charlotte Dujardin, which doubled the fervour of the ongoing debate about whether sport involving animals should be part of the Olympics at all – a debate that’s bigger than all of us.
The mainstream media largely focused their on-the-ground attention and rider-questioning on the eventing dressage; whether that was down to some confusion between the disciplines, or simply because eventing was the first chance they’d get to access Olympic equestrians, I don’t know, but in those early days at the very start of the Games, there was only one question on the table: is equestrian sport abusive? I, and several of my media compatriots, had calls and emails come in from a variety of radio and TV outlets looking for insider intel; I opted to jump onto a live interview with the BBC to shed some context into how our industry works, the common goal so many of us are working for, and the importance of putting the horse first at all times, but throughout, I was so aware that it may well be too late to make any meaningful impact.
The fact of the matter is this: our industry is not perfect, and the more we try to fight back against social license, or nay-say the accusations that are levied at us from outside our bubble, the worse we’ll make this for ourselves.
I won’t win many friends by pointing out the truth, which is that we could all stand do to a bit of housekeeping, and really take stock of every last one of our horsemanship practices. Are we really always putting our horses first? It’s human nature to push through momentary discomfort when there’s a bigger positive outcome on the other side of it, but is it fair to demand our horses do the same, when we have no way of communicating to them why, or what might be gained from it? Do they gain anything from it, if the bigger positive outcome is, say, successfully learning a flying change or making the time on a cross-country course?
There’s a huge amount of tradition deeply embedded into our sport, and some of that tradition is simply outdated notions of how things should be done. Until we start to get really, really honest with ourselves, and face some hard truths and some harder paths towards change, our sport, across the disciplines, will continue to lose public favour. And then, we will lose it.
Instead, I’d love to see us collectively get better at shouldering criticism; to not get distracted by very secondary concerns, like why or when a person should whistle-blow, but instead to focus on why there was something to whistle-blow about in the first place.
Human nature, too, means we’re prone to deflection. We don’t see ourselves as the bad guys; we see the justification for our behaviour, and it can blind us to the broader reality. It’s so crucial that we don’t drink our own Kool-Aid, though, if we want to keep our world afloat. Many years ago, I worked a season as a hunt groom for a hunt that was besieged by saboteurs.
Every time there was an accusation levied by those saboteurs that the hunt might not be laying trails, but instead, illegally hunting live quarry, the hunt – as a collective entity and via its powers-that-be – expressed vocal shock and outrage that they could ever be accused of something so baseless and so rooted in a lack of understanding of how hunting works. At the same time, throughout the season, they were doing exactly what they were accused of. But the reflex to deny and deflect had become so well-used that it was almost as though they believed their own defence.
I’ve seen versions of this play out in so many different ways across the industry for years, and it’s this that will be the final nail in the coffin for us if we don’t hold ourselves accountable.
The next time an accusation is levied against our industry – whether that’s a claim of endemic abuse, or observations on underdeveloped withers, or something else entirely – we need to pause before we snap back. We need to sit with it before we accuse the accuser of not having the knowledge to understand the industry. We need, in short, to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. Because if we do, we’ll discover that there’s actually an awful lot that we can do to change our fates and fortunes, and our horses’ lives, for the better.
Dressage got its moment in the sun again, thanks in no small part to Snoop Dogg. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
To bring this back to something relevant to Paris, the other side of the coin is that we seldom, if ever, have the opportunity for positive press that we have during the Games. Thank the lord above, truly, for the appointment of Snoop Dogg as NBC’s correspondent for the Games this year; not only did he bring a delightful favourite-bonkers-uncle vibe to the whole thing, with a genuine enthusiasm and positivity in all his roles, he also made it seem possible to actually like dressage. And that might sound like an incredibly dismissive thing to say – I can assure you, I had a little cry over a couple of the Freestyles, I’m not knocking dressage here – but if we step outside of our own bubble, the public really does view dressage as one of those ‘sorry, but why?’ sort of sports. Like breaking, but with even less potential for humour.
But in comes Snoop, living his best life in a tail coat and half chaps over sneakers (genius; love it. No notes from me) and a helmet over a durag, and he showed us that you can laugh at and with the things you love, and sometimes that’s the purest expression of love that there is. And then, too, he showed us that you can be visibly moved by sport, and you don’t need to play it cool – you can just feel a lot of feelings about a horse dancing. And that, whether you’re into his music or not, is the greatest endorsement the sport has had, well, ever.
It’s also one of the strongest arguments we’ve got for doing the hard work to keep equestrian sport in the Games. If we lose the Olympics, we lose a huge amount of funding – each nation allocates a certain amount of funding on a four-year cycle across its various sports, dependent on performance criteria, and if a sport isn’t in the Olympics, its spot on that recipient list goes, too. For some context, that figure boiled down to just shy of £15 million from UK Sport funding for the British equestrian efforts in this cycle. And so, it’s fair enough to say that if we lose the Olympics, and thus lose the funding, we probably lose the sport, too.
But even if we did find a way to some monetary security, losing the Games would also dry up a huge part of our ability to access new audiences, to engender new enthusiasm. It’s not impossible to be a successful spectator sport sans Olympics – Formula One manages it well – but it does represent the loss of a huge opportunity for positive exposure. We need to decide what that’s worth to us.
On leading with stories
For a long time now, I’ve stood by my firm belief that the best way to market equestrian sport to a broader audience is to lead with its characters. No one has ever gotten into a sport because of its rules; I’ve had the offside rule explained to me multiple times by various enthusiastic men (who aren’t very good at chatting women up), and not one of those explanations has made me think, ‘well, this is fascinating; I’d love to go home and stick on the football and watch this rule in action!’ Similarly, no format changes or simplifications or tweaks are going to bring in new viewers, because that’s simply not how people work. The Olympics, though, proves the power of character-led presentation over, and over, and over again.
Can you tell me the rules of shooting? No? Can you picture the chap who won the silver in that sport? Probably. Do you know how gymnastics floor routines are scored? No? Did you cry for Simone Biles after having watched her Netflix documentary on her mental health struggles over the previous Olympic cycle? Do you really love pommel horse or do you just love Stephen Nedoroscik and his Rubik’s cubes? Have you ever tuned into women’s rugby before or do you just see in Ilona Maher something that speaks to you, someone who represents a type of strong, fierce, so often less-heralded femininity that you, a woman who can carry three grain sacks at once, can relate to?
Morocco’s Noor Slaoui – one of the great characters of this year’s Olympics. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Likewise, unless someone’s already an enthusiast, they’re not tuning in to equestrian sport at the Games because they’ve always wanted to see a 10 given for a flying change (and honestly, if they are, then they may well be setting themselves up for disappointment). They’ll tune in for a couple of reasons: it happens to be one of the options that pops up, and so we’ve got a few minutes to try to keep their interest, or they’re tuning in to see what all the controversy’s been about, so we’ve got a few minutes to show them our best selves, or they’ve seen someone or something on social media and they’d like to follow that person or that story.
Maybe they’re a woman from an Arab country and they feel emboldened by Morocco’s Noor Slaoui, who was eventing’s first-ever Arab competitor and grew up riding mules in the Casablanca mountains; maybe they’re stuck in bed following an injury and feeling down in the dumps about it, but watching Australia’s Shane Rose bounce back after a laundry list of damages done this spring helps them to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Maybe they’re a new mum, struggling with the loss of identity that so often comes after having a baby, and seeing women like Ros Canter and Jonelle Price continuing to chase down their dreams after having children makes them realise that they can, and will, find themselves again.
There are so many maybes, and so many stories, and so many fascinating people and fascinating horses and extraordinary threads, and it’s those that we need to lead with, always. The commitment to following the rest of the sport will come after that – first, we need to reach people on a human level.
