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I recorded an episode of the Superhuman show this afternoon (it won’t be going out until late June) which is a chat show about the run up to the Paralympic Games in Rio. Alongside some truly impressive and inspiring sportspersons I ended up mainly talking about Me1 Vs Me2 snooker and how I looked forward to a world where that was the only sport covered at the Olympics. I hope I didn’t come across as crazy. I also had a go at competing against multi-gold medal winner David Weir in a test of who was best at going fast in a wheelchair. I don’t want to give any spoilers, so I can’t let you know who won. But you may be surprised (if you think that I win).
I was sat alongside Sophie Christiansen and Natasha Baker, who also won multiple gold medals in equestrian events at London 2012. The horses are controlled by the movements of the riders, which is pretty amazing in Sophie’s case as she has Cerebral Palsy and thus has a lot of involuntary movements, yet her horse, Rio, is able to understand which movements he should obey and which he should ignore. Natasha has no movement in her legs, which for most riders is how you communicate with the horse, so that’s another set of challenges.
I hadn’t really considered the fact that there had to be such a close bond between horse and rider in these events, imagining that the rider could be on pretty much any horse. Because I am an idiot obviously. But I’d quite like to see a dressage event where horses are given out at random to riders they don’t know and see what happens. I might allow that event in my otherwise only self-playing snooker Olympics of 2024.
And as they talked about going to Rio, I started to wonder how they got the horses to Brazil. I was going to chip in and ask, but everyone else was wondering the same and so it came up organically. Obviously this led to a predictable, but still amusing line of comedy about them sitting in business class or being kept in the overhead lockers (that’s why people rush on with priority boarding so they don’t get stuck with their carry on luggage because there’s a huge mare up above them). Too late I imagined the scenario of all the horses coming down the luggage carousel and people arguing over which horse belonged to who. In my Olympics this might be the way to randomise the horses and riders. It would look great.
In reality they are transported in the hold in crates with two horses put together (which could make a great horse based rom com), which is still rather incredible.
Anyway it was an interesting show to be on, even if my participation in it mainly wasted time when real athletes could have been discussing their lives.
