Ninja Warrior or an Olympic sport? The battle for modern pentathlon’s soul

When the Palace of Versailles was designated the home of modern pentathlon at the Paris Olympics, organisers had no idea of the exquisite drama that might play out there in two years’ time.

On the penultimate day of competition, a grand open-air show jumping arena, under construction on the Etoile Royale esplanade at the heart of the Palace gardens, will host the final showjumping competitions for the embattled sport before it swaps out horses for Ninja Warrior-style obstacle racing, in a desperate bid for Olympic survival.

Athletes compete in a test running of the obstacle discipline in Turkey earlier this year. The UIPM is proposing to introduce obstacle racing to replace replce the equestrian discipline in modern pentathlon.Credit: Getty

It will be a poignant moment for the sport once championed by the French father of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, as the ultimate “moral and physical test of the complete athlete”, but lately diminished by an animal cruelty scandal, corruption claims and an athlete revolt.

At the centre of the story are two Australians, one vowing to disrupt this weekend’s vote on obstacle racing at the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM)’s global Congress this weekend, and the other waiting in the wings for his counterpart to fail.

“A core value of modern pentathlon is identifying the complete athlete,” Ninja Warrior proponent Ian Adamson says. “Obstacle sport events do this because they balance speed, strength, balance, coordination, spatial awareness, problem-solving and overall athleticism.”

Adamson is the adventure-mad president of World Obstacle Racing, the international federation in the box seat to benefit from riding’s removal. Sydney-raised and now based in the United States and Switzerland, he is in Delhi, en route to Everest Base Camp for the 2022 Altitude Obstacle Racing Championships, when the Herald tracks him down.

“In my observation of the four (UIPM-staged) test events, the athletes adapt quickly and overwhelmingly love the formats,” he says.

“One [format] looks like the Ninja Warrior TV shows and one looks like the OCR Sprint format.” By that he means a series of frames, ramps, ropes, swings, ladders and boards that competitors navigate over a timed 100m course. To the novice eye it resembles eventing, just without the horses and resulting air of elegance and risk.

Under Adamson’s founding leadership, World Obstacle signed a secret 2015 memorandum of understanding with UIPM to merge the two sports. That MOU “came to a dead end, as many do”, Adamson says, but the relationship between the governing bodies stuck.

Alex Watson’s failed doping test at the Seoul Olympics was front page news in 1988.Credit: Sun-Herald

So well, in fact, that it is front and centre of the campaign being fought by the other Australian, former pentathlete Alex Watson, to save riding and oust the UIPM’s current leadership.

Watson is a three-time Olympian, dubbed the ‘Cappuccino Kid’ for a caffeine violation that had him thrown out of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

A self-styled ‘disruptor’ aghast at modern pentathlon’s reduced standing since his days as competition manager at the Sydney Olympics, the charismatic Queenslander is going head-to-head with the UIPM’s powerful and entrenched president of some 30 years, Klaus Schormann.

After a 20-year absence from the sport and a doping conviction against his name, it is a bold move at the 11th hour.

“I got involved because of two things,” Watson tells the Herald from his home on the Sunshine Coast, where he founded and ran an award-winning equine tourism operation until its sale last year. “The first was just my sense of disappointment with the way the sport had gone and was being managed. The people in charge have been there too long, they have an entrenched power base they are clinging to and the sport isn’t developing or being properly managed. The other side was that the athletes are being totally ignored. The majority want riding retained.”

What is obstacle racing?

Obstacle racing is a comparatively new sport popularised by the Ninja Warrior television show. Obstacles include popular ninja racing apparatus such as sonic steps, double swing, tilting ladders, floating steps, single cat grab, globe grasper and warped wall.

Modern pentathlon’s global governing body, the UIPM, wants to replace the horse riding round with obstacle racing to preserve the sport’s place in the Olympics program beyond Paris 2024.

The sport requires a combination of speed, strength, agility, power and balance as athletes navigate a 100-metre course of between eight and 14 obstacles in the shortest time possible. The UIPM has held four test events this year but never as part of a full modern pentathlon race.

Modern pentathlon has fallen on hard times. It is not on the program for the 2028 Games. A perennial cellar-dweller in the supporter metrics watched closely by the International Olympic Committee, the sport has been in constant flux for at least the past three decades. It has moved from a five-day to a one-day event, done away with live rounds in the shooting, replaced the air pistols with lasers, combined the shooting and the running, and turned the riding into a final round-only discipline. None of it has been able to turn the ship around fast enough.

Ian Adamson

The final straw came in Tokyo last year, when German rider Annika Schleu and her coach Kim Raisner were pictured hitting Schleu’s panicked horse in an effort to get it moving on the course. Before a distraught Schleu could dismount at the end of a disastrous ride, her smartwatch was blowing up with online abuse. The UIPM condemned the actions of Raisner, promised a thorough review and two months later voted to drop riding at its 2021 global Congress.

The move outraged many athletes, including Australia’s 2016 gold medallist Chloe Esposito, who said the abrupt decision was dumped on athletes.

“It is heartbreaking. I don’t know if I can really keep being interested in watching and following along – it won’t feel like pentathlon anymore,” she told the Herald. “I’ve been riding since I was 10. Young athletes have worked hard on their riding. All that goes to waste.”

The move drove a group of athletes, including Britain’s reigning Olympic and world champion Joe Choong, to set up Pentathlon United which, in turn, looked to Watson for help. On Thursday, a separate group of American athletes released an astonishing rebuke of their national body, alleging that USA Pentathlon Multisport boss Rob Stull lied about holding a meeting with them to discuss the proposed changes to the sport and calling for his resignation.

“Not only did this meeting not happen but Mr. Stull has persisted in promoting the [UIPM] agenda that suggests that athletes support the removal of riding in favor of a ninja race. This again is a blatant disregard for the truth. USAPM athletes, like 90 per cent of pentathlon athletes worldwide, have been very clear on their stance that riding should remain part of the sport...,” the group said in a statement.

“This sport can be a cracker if it’s run properly.”

Alex Watson

For others, such as Kitty Chiller, the switch is a matter of survival for what she calls the “ultimate kitchen table sport”. Chiller finished 14th in the modern pentathlon in Sydney and, among many other high profile sports administration roles, served as president of Modern Pentathlon Australia for 12 years.

She says comments last year from IOC president Thomas Bach warning modern pentathlon and other sports, such as boxing, to “change or be changed”, were as clear a signal as possible that a radical shake-up was necessary. Chiller, now the president of Modern Pentathlon Oceania, also believes the riding element — in which she placed second in Sydney — is a handbrake on the sport’s development around the world.

Alex Watson competed in three Olympics and is leading a revolt against the global leadership of modern pentathlon.Credit: Juanita Wilson

“The key is having sports that are accessible with minimal infrastructure, equipment and expense. In modern pentathlon the approaches we’ve made to developing federations in the region, as soon as they know there’s horse riding in the sport they’re not able to even contemplate getting involved,” she said.

Watson is undaunted. He launched his bid for presidency in London two weeks ago, determined to bring in a new era of transparency, reinstate riding and rebuild the sport’s commercial model, which is dependent on Olympic funding.

There is the matter of his 1988 doping violation hanging in the air in the lead-up to Congress which, in accordance with the UIPM constitution, should preclude him from holding a leadership position.

Watson’s lifetime ban was reduced to two years on appeal by the Australian Olympic Committee and caffeine was later removed from the list of banned substances in the Olympic Games. He never applied to the IOC to have the breach rescinded.

He is bemused by the suggestion the UIPM would come after him now when he served as competition manager in Sydney then sat on the UIPM executive board until 2002.

“I was eligible then, why would I be ineligible now,” he asks.

“This sport can be a cracker if it’s run properly. What is ridiculous to me is, here are these people who’ve been there for over 20 years, who screwed it all up so badly, they’re then saying ‘don’t worry, we’ll bring in obstacle racing and we’ll be capable managers of that’.

“If it was any other organisation you’d put a broom through there and say ‘you’re not competent’. Someone must take some responsibility.”

‘They used us’: Pentathlete at centre of animal cruelty case plans a comeback

The German pentathlete at the centre of the Tokyo Olympics animal cruelty controversy has set her sights on redemption in Paris as a behind-the-scenes video called into question the role of the sport’s governing body in the saga.

Germany’s Annika Schleu will return to competition next year after taking a year out of the sport to recover from the online abuse she received after a disastrous ride in Tokyo.

Schleu’s coach, Kim Raisner, who was disqualified from the Olympics for her role in the saga, said Schleu had married and had her first child in the 18 months since Tokyo, but was now plotting a return.

“She wants to come back for Paris but she has to [start slowly],” Raisner said. “If everything goes well we can see her back [competing] in the second half of [2023].”

Schleu was forced into virtual hiding after footage went viral of her using her crop and spurs in a desperate attempt to get her horse moving in the showjumping round of the event in August last year.

The footage also captured Raisner striking the horse’s hindquarters with her fist, an illegal act of intervention from a coach that had the respected German ‘black carded’ from the Games.

German coach Kim Raisner (centre) and rider Annika Schleu following the incident involving horse Saint Boy at the Tokyo Olympics.Credit: Getty

Schleu was later cleared by the sport’s governing body, the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM), of any use of excessive force on the panicked gelding, Saint Boy. But she faced death threats and was vilified on social media.

Raisner was forced to undergo educational training by the UIPM, but kept her riding licence and remains Germany’s head coach.

She said the incident was used by the UIPM to justify their decision last November to announce they would remove riding from the sport.

“We are not the reason, but this is what they are making [the reason],” Raisner said. “They used us, or this incident, to make it like ‘this is the reason’. It was the wrong person in the wrong moment. If Annika had had a super ride, everyone would have cheered because she would have won the gold medal, and they [the UIPM] would have taken the ride from the Brazilian pentathlete, who fell from the horse, and blamed them to show pentathlon has bad riding.

Saint Boy refused to jump for German rider Annika Schleu at the Tokyo Olympics.Credit: Getty

“I think UIPM could do more for changing [the standard of riding] but it’s very hard to only have nice pictures. This will always be an issue.”

Raisner’s comments came as a video surfaced of Saint Boy, visibly agitated in the warm-up arena with its regular rider, and an international coach blasted the UIPM’s staging of the event in remarks prepared for Australian challenger, Alex Watson.

The video and briefing document, both obtained by the Herald and Age on condition of anonymity, together with competition footage of Schleu’s ride, paint a picture of a horse that should never have been in competition and a shambolic event that put other riders in danger.

“I didn’t hurt the horse but I did something in the rules that is not allowed and for this they can give me a black card. No problem.”

Modern pentathlon coach Kim Raisner

“Horse was strong and very difficult to control, high head wearing tight martingale [strap], rider using both hands stops to time horse’s strides on approach to take off, horse was always in attempt to run away and hard to bend,” the document author wrote. “This horse was difficult to ride for his own rider [almost collided on entry to triple] any experienced horse person would not include it in the draw for women’s competition.”

Raisner said she had no interest in weighing into the politics of her sport and would coach whatever format was decided on for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

After enduring death threats and online vilification in the aftermath of the event, Raisner said the days of animal involvement in Olympic sports could be numbered.

“When I look at how the world looks, even equestrian has an issue, I think,” she said. “If pentathlon has no riding and we stay in the Olympics without it, I am interested to see what happens with equestrian, if people jump on and start blaming them. In the last four years, the mood has changed around [the question of] should animals be in elite sports.”

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