Dressage, a technical sport in which horses are marked by judges on their movements in the arena, is one of three equestrian disciplines at the Olympic Games.
The original competition schedule for last year’s Australian championships said the grand champion award would be determined by the average of a horse and rider’s best two scores in the dressage grand prix and either of the other two top-level classes – the grand prix special and the grand prix freestyle, in which horses and riders perform their own routines set to music and are also judged on artistic merits.
David McKinnon rides Estupendo at the Australian Dressage Championships at Sydney International Equestrian Centre last October.Credit: Simon Scully
Dressage scores are typically in percentage terms and Estupendo, with McKinnon in the saddle, recorded the highest average of 72.9 per cent after winning the freestyle and placing second in the grand prix, edging out Hanna and Ivanhoe 1 on 71.8 per cent.
But Lipshut said she was informed after the competition that Hanna and her horse were the overall victors on points.
Other clauses in the rules said championships would be determined by a points system, with the winner of each category receiving 35 points, second place 34 points and so on.
She was told the use of the points system had been made clear in a booklet given to all riders at the Australian championships, but she said she and McKinnon had not been made aware of it and it was otherwise not announced.
In a sport in which leading horses can be worth millions of dollars, Estupendo’s value stood to rise if he was grand champion. A solicitor for Lipshut initially told Equestrian Australia she was considering selling the horse and the result would improve the price. But the owner, who said she suffered a stroke six years ago and could no longer ride, insisted her fight was about correcting an injustice rather than money.
“The rug is the prize. To win it is such an honour,” she said. “They changed the rules after the entries had closed and they didn’t tell anyone.”
Equestrian Australia officials would not comment, but the sport challenged her assertion that the scoring formula was altered at all, appearing to put the debate down to how its rules have been interpreted.
Hanna, who at 70 has ambitions to compete in a seventh Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, said she believed she had been unfairly denied the title under the rules in 2023, and she had approached event organiser Toni Venhaus before last year’s championships to ask what she had to do.
She said she was told she needed to ride in the grand prix and grand prix special, both of which she won to get 70 points, one ahead of McKinnon, who was second in the grand prix and didn’t ride in the special. Hanna couldn’t take part in the freestyle leg – in which McKinnon rode Estupendo to the sounds of Les Miserables – because she had to attend her daughter’s funeral.
Mary Hanna rides at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.Credit: Getty Images
McKinnon, who runs an equestrian training centre in the NSW Southern Highlands, declined to comment. He did not file a complaint of his own.
It is not clear who was responsible for setting and communicating the scoring system.
Venhaus, a long-time official with Dressage NSW, which hosted the Australian championships, said she had been asked not to speak to media.
In an email in late 2024, Equestrian Australia’s integrity complaints manager Paul Williams told her a points system had been resolved as the fairest way to calculate which horse and rider was grand champion because percentage scores in the freestyle were higher, giving combinations in that category an advantage when the final results were tallied.
He had earlier informed her that her protest could not be accepted because she was not the horse’s rider and complaints could only be made “by human participants directly involved in or adversely affected”.
She was also told she missed a time limit to lodge an appeal.
Lipshut contends as the owner of Estupendo, bought from the Netherlands in 2022, she was an affected party, particularly as it is the horse that is primarily judged in dressage rather than the rider, and her complaint was never properly considered.
Dressage is a highly technical category in which horses are judged on their movements in the arena.Credit: AP
She alleges Williams took advantage of the power imbalance between them and bullied and intimidated her during a phone call, causing her distress.
“He wouldn’t let me talk, he was very aggressive. He said ‘You’re an owner, you don’t have any rights to put in a complaint’,” Lipshut said.
“I never normally get intimidated by people on the phone, but he would not let me talk and he was so aggressive. So I said to him, ‘I’m recording this conversation,’ because he really made me feel so uncomfortable.”
Lipshut told this masthead she wasn’t actually taping the call but said so because she felt threatened. She said she told Williams that when he objected to being recorded, but he hung up and didn’t return her subsequent voicemail message.
Williams later emailed her to tell her that recording a phone call without his consent was against Victorian law. He added that unlawful conduct was also in breach of Equestrian Australia’s code of conduct and he would be notifying other integrity staff so “any consequences can be assessed”.
Williams, who has since left Equestrian Australia, declined to comment.
He had worked for four months earlier last year for Paddle Australia as canoeing and kayaking’s national integrity manager in a role that was shared by Rowing Australia and the Australian Dragon Boat Federation.
Sport Integrity Australia, which provides funding to sports to employ national integrity managers, said it “supported” the water sports with their shortlisting and recruitment and later suggested Williams could help Equestrian Australia in a short-term capacity after its national integrity manager left.
State body Equestrian NSW has endorsed Lipshut’s bid to have the scoring controversy heard by the National Sports Tribunal, the independent sports umpire established by the federal government in 2020.
But Equestrian Australia has refused to refer the matter to the tribunal, which requires the agreement of both parties to accept such a case under the horse sport’s regulations.
“How is that fair? It makes no sense,” Lipshut said.
Hanna, whose husband Rob was the Australian team leader at multiple Olympics, has attempted to defuse the situation, even ringing Equestrian Australia and offering to relinquish the title after Lipshut took up the issue on social media.
“But they said, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” Hanna said. “They believed it was done correctly.”
Hanna said dressage shows were run by volunteers and “nobody should be crucified” over the dispute. “It’s a thankless and difficult and unpaid task to run a national championship, and it’s very difficult to get people to do this,” she said.
“I’m not going to criticise people if there’s any mistakes with rules and things.”
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Equestrian Australia, which receives almost $6 million a year in government funding, has endured other turmoil with resistance from state associations to a proposed new centralised governance structure.
There has also been turnover in senior posts, with chair Christie Freeman departing in May and chief executive Sam Jones resigning in July.
Zac Miles, the mayor of Sydney’s Hunter’s Hill Council, has since become chairman, and experienced sports administrator and sports lawyer Ben Houston – the president of Commonwealth Games Australia and for the past six years chief executive of Australian Sailing – has come on as interim chief executive.
David Luff, who was an advisor to former prime minister John Howard and was brought in by Optus for crisis communications advice during the telco’s Triple Zero scandal, is also assisting Equestrian Australia.
Now living on an agistment farm south-east of Melbourne, Estupendo’s dressage days are over, after he tore a ligament in an accident following the scoring affair, Lipshut said.
His owner, though, is still campaigning for a title she is adamant should be his.
“I love this horse. I bought him to enjoy him,” Lipshut said. “I bought him to give me a reason to travel interstate and watch him compete.
“It’s been my absolute dream to have a horse like this. I’m just so angry and upset.”
