The Minister of Agriculture expressed his indignation at the fact that riding was taken out of his five-year course.

Agriculture Minister István Nagy, the decision of the International Pentathlon Federation (UIPM) to remove horse riding from the program of the sport is profoundly shocking and provokes legitimate professional and moral protest. On Thursday, the head of the agricultural ministry wrote on his Facebook page: "for us Hungarians, pentathlon is an important sport, our country leads the all-time Olympic ranking with nine gold, eight silver and six bronze medals".

The quintet, consisting of shooting, swimming, fencing, running and riding, has been on the program of the pentathlon since the 1912 Olympics, and the sports have never changed until now.

As he emphasized, it was riding that put the crown on the öttusa sport: "riding by the horse was the most exciting competition branch of the öttusa sport, which could not be predicted at all in advance, where the harmonious cooperation of horse and man, which creates harmonious value and can be measured by results, was also shown". 

István Nagy said:

As Hungarians, out of our commitment to sports and horses, we declare November 2, 2021 as a day of mourning for the öttusa sport". 

As he explained, "the invisible monster that is sweeping the world today", whose rampage destroying millennia-old cultures, natural and built values, human faith and destiny, has reached sports is also called the octet sport.

According to the Minister of Agriculture, the biggest disrespect towards sports is when "interest groups, citing inexplicable reasons, claim the right to change the professional records of the most classic, close to human activity, and traditional sports."

"It was precisely the versatility of human performance that raised the pentathlon sport to the honorable level that we can call the most strikingly that the pentathlon athletes are polyhistorians of the sport," he emphasized. "Without the rider's competition branch, the adjective öpttusa is no longer an appropriate term in the name of the sport. The crown for the five-sport sport was precisely riding, where the result of contact with two living beings and not an inanimate medium or object mattered. This unclassifiable political decision is deeply shocking, humiliating and causes legitimate professional and moral protest," he concluded his post.

Source: MTI