A German animal welfare association announced on Friday, August 13, that it had filed a complaint against pentathlete Annika Schleu, accusing her of mistreating her horse during the modern pentathlon riding event at the Tokyo Olympics.
Annika Schleu and her trainer Kim Raisner are charged with “animal cruelty” and “complicity in animal cruelty,” according to a statement from the German Association for the Protection of Animals (Deutscher Tierschutzbund).
Rejection of repeated obstacles
At the Olympics, Annika Schleu, at the top of the rankings before the riding event, had all the trouble in the world controlling her horse, hitting it a lot. This then multiplied the refusal of obstacles, causing the fall in the classification of the German.
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His trainer Kim Raisner was later excluded from the Olympics by the International Federation (UIPM) for hitting the horse.
During the test, she had been heard encouraging Annika Schleu to “hit” the animal, drawn according to the rules of the modern pentathlon.
The pentathlete’s explanations
“Of course, an athlete focused on Olympic gold is under enormous stress at the moment, but that is no excuse for animal cruelty,” said Thomas Schröder, president of the complainant association.
Annika Schleu had explained it in the columns of the newspaper Die Zeit, assuring that she had not been “extremely hard” with the horse while acknowledging that she could have been “a little more calm and reasonable”.
Kim Raisner, for his part, told SID, a subsidiary of AFP, that Annika Schleu “had not tortured the horse in any way.”
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