“Today, we salute our horses and the men and women who ride them,” says the announcer, introducing the women’s modern pentathlon semi-finals in the historic town of Versailles just outside Paris. The sport has been part of the Games for 112 years, and its creation is widely credited to Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement.
But in a Games now bursting with blink-and-you-miss-it action sports curated for global television and social media audiences, modern pentathlon has been deemed not modern enough. At the Paris Games, the previously five-day program taking in fencing, horse riding, swimming, running and shooting has been compressed to a 90 minute spectacular.
Yet what the announcer was getting at was a far more significant change. In LA 2028, the sport’s horse riding component is set be replaced by obstacle course, tapping into the wider cultural impact of TV shows like Ninja Warrior. And so, the event at Versailles represents the end of an era.
Australia’s only representative in Paris, Janse van Rensburg – who was inspired to pursue the sport when she met 2016 gold medallist Chloe Esposito as a child – says it’s sad day. “For a lot of the older girls, this is the end of their sport, it’s really changing. Listening to my German friends, they have a stable and it’s been open the whole time, they’ve had one coach for like 50 years, and they’re closing it.”
President of Modern Pentathlon Australia, Maki Takken, says the change has caused controversy in Australia. “Because our athletes have predominantly come from a pony club background in Australia, there was widespread unhappiness,” she says.
Strolling around the finely ordered fields just outside Paris with thousands of fans, that unhappiness is not immediately obvious. On a warm morning, there are 15,000 filling the temporary stands by 10am.
The atmosphere – though vibrant – is a world away from the kind of sporting experiences which have been handed the spotlight at these Games. The organisers have placed contests like skateboarding, breaking and beach volleyball at the centre of the city, forever connecting the 2024 Olympics and Paris’ famous architecture with these pursuits that, compared to modern pentathlon, might be termed even-more-modern.
In the first semi-final’s showjumping phase, there is none of the music or manufactured crowd engagement that was seen at the breaking or beach volleyball the previous day. Only when the inflatable fencing stage is ready, does the DJ takes on a greater role, the music filling the spaces between bouts. The MC does his best too, explaining why the athletes are fencing today, even though they already fenced yesterday. (Today is is a bonus round.)
Janse van Rensburg – apart from being Australia’s lone pentathlon representative – also happens to be the national fencing champion in épée. On Saturday she secures two victories, giving her a time bonus in the laser run to come, a 3km jog interspersed by target shooing. “I’ve never seen a crowd like that for pentathlon,” she said. There is a 10-minute break before the swimming, before the athletes dive in for eight laps of the 25m pool. Janse van Rensburg strips off, and wins her heat in a little over two minutes, close to her PB and the semi-final’s third best time.
Takken says the next iteration of the sport – which she predicts will drop the “modern” part of its name before long – is likely to gain an influx of athletes. “People who weren’t ever interested in riding and who would never have considered pentathlon for that reason now might say, ‘actually, that’s a sport I could do’.”
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Australia’s greatest moment in the sport was in Rio where Esposito won the country’s only Olympic medal. The former champion even messaged Janse van Rensburg good luck three weeks ago. “I saw her message, and I just couldn’t respond at first, because I was just like, fan-girling for like, a solid two days,” she says.
In Saturday’s semi-final, the Australian finished a credible 13th, just missing out on a place in the final. With the sport’s future up in the air, it might be her first and last Olympic foray.
Right now however, the 20-year-old – who has ridden horses since her childhood – is thinking only about the closing ceremony, and a holiday. “It’s been very hectic couple of years, so I just want to make sure I know what I want to do before I commit to anything, and just make sure I enjoy it.”
For a sport that requires of its athletes extreme adaption, it’s now pentathlon’s turn. “It’s already gone from being a five-day sport to a one-day sport, and that’s now down to not quite a 90-minute sport,” Takken says. “It’s inherently part of the DNA of the sport for athletes to be flexible and adaptable and resilient and self-reliant, so while Versailles is the end of an era in a sense, I think it also marks a turning point in pentathlon towards a different future. But I do feel it has a future.”