PARIS — Katie Ledecky can dominate pretty much anyone on the planet in the pool, but what about on a horse? LeBron James is one of the best basketball players in the world, but how would he do with a sword in his hand? Simone Biles is an amazing gymnast, but what if she had to run a race while firing a laser gun?
The Olympics are great at identifying the best athletes in individual sports. But there’s only one event — a strange little outlier — that identifies the best athletes in multiple sports. Where else can you see the world’s best athletes try their luck at sword fighting, horse riding, shooting, running and swimming, all in 90 minutes?
There is a purity to the modern pentathlon. Like the heptathlon and the decathlon, it uses a combination of skills to judge the best athletes. But it is also a determinedly unconventional competition, designed to crown the 19th-century definition of an all-round athlete. There is a certain elegance to the five disciplines that make up the modern pentathlon; a truly modern pentathlon would probably include competitive eating, Wordle, and Power Slap.
Due to its archaic nature—and because the use of horses in athletics events has fallen far out of fashion—the Paris Olympics will be the last time that the modern pentathlon will exist in its current form. The horse element of the pentathlon will be removed and replaced with an “American Ninja Warrior”-style obstacle course. And even that may not be enough to salvage the sport’s Olympic fortunes; the modern pentathlon is still not guaranteed a spot on the Brisbane list for 2032.
That would be a shame, because the modern pentathlon is precisely the kind of event that the Olympic Games should cherish.
The modern pentathlon is the creation of Pierre de Coubertinthe French baron who created the Olympic Games. His goal was to test all elements of a man’s military prowess; the modern pentathlon was open only to men until 2000. The modern pentathlon even has its own hypothetical backstory: imagine a soldier trapped behind enemy lines. What would that soldier have to know and do to escape? Run, shoot, sword fight, swim, and ride horses, assuming he was captured before the invention of the automobile or the mobile phone.
Originally, the modern pentathlon lasted five days, but it was condensed into a single day beginning with the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. This year, after a preliminary fencing match in the arena used for boxing, the modern pentathlon takes place entirely in the space of about 100 minutes in the equestrian arena at Versailles, a frenetic series of events popular enough to sell out the vast grandstands on Friday.
The modern pentathlon begins with a horse jumping discipline, and this is where the pentathlon has run into the most trouble in recent years. Animal rights activists have long challenged and criticized the use of animals in human competitions on a variety of grounds, starting with the safety, security, and welfare of the horses.
The modern pentathlon has been largely focused on justifying its Olympic existence in the 2010s. An incident in Tokyo in 2021 could have spelled the end of the sport as an Olympic event.
Horses are randomly assigned to participants, who have about 20 minutes to bond with their equine friends. That didn’t work out so well in 2021, when German women’s coach Kim Raisner punched athlete Annika Schleu’s horse in frustration. The incident infuriated pretty much everyone from athletes to activists to organizers, and the future of the sport was clear: no more horses after Paris 2024.
Officials with the International Modern Pentathlon Union (UIPM) reviewed about 60 possible replacement disciplines before settling on obstacle racing. Officials earlier this week tried to spin the move as an attempt to appeal to youth rather than a way to distance the sport from accusations of horse abuse.
“That’s a perfect product for the TV audience for the same kind of facilities,” said Shiny Fang, secretary general of UIPM. “Of course, you don’t have to feed the horses and there are already many specific obstacle clubs with all these facilities. Many athletes can already train and compete.”
Friday’s competition starts with a tribute to the horses in their farewell performance — “Today we salute our horses and the men and women who ride them” — but if the horses are aware that this is their swan song, they don’t show it.
A dozen obstacles are set out on the white sand of the equestrian arena’s inner track, and shortly after 1 p.m. a bell rings to begin the event. Riders must guide their new equine friends over 12 obstacles, with points awarded for grace, positioning, and speed. Most horses make it through the course without incident, though a few fall short and knock over crossbars or—in one particularly unlucky case—a whole pole. Riders pat their horses’ necks as they leave the arena, and then they have just a few minutes to prepare for the next event: fencing.
The key to the modern pentathlon is speed; events come and go in rapid succession. There is no time for elaborate tournaments; it is fight and go. The preliminary round, held the day before the semi-finals, is the fencing equivalent of speed dating — each competitor competes against every other competitor in a series of one-touch battles. That sets them up for the next day’s events.
On Friday, workers at the arena lift an entire fencing stadium — filled with air, like a giant bouncy castle — out of the sand after the horses finish. From there, fencing goes from speed dating to survival — the 18th-place competitor fights the 17th-place competitor, and the winner of that takes on the 16th-place competitor, and so on. The first few fights proceed in chalky order, but then 10th-place Emiliano Hernandez of Mexico goes on a run, winning five fights in a row before going under. 5th-place Valentin Prades of France rocks the crowd by storming the table and taking out the top four numbers to claim the event … and then it’s off to the pool.
The 200m swim is the middle event of the pentathlon, and yes, there is a temporary pool built in the Versailles arena, right next to the equestrian beach. However, it is a 25-meter pool — the size of your average neighborhood swimming pool — which means competitors have to swim eight lengths of a pool that looks like it should have a lifeguard, deck chairs, and a few kids ready to play Marco Polo.
The last two events—running and shooting—are combined into one event called the “Laser Run,” which is cool, but not as cool as the name suggests. Modern Pentathlon, in the very reasonable name of safety, has switched from pistols to air pistols to lasers over the course of its existence, and competitors are given a few minutes after they dry off to prep with the lasers.
Their goal in these final two events: to run 3,000 kilometers — a little under two miles — with four stops at shooting stations. They must hit five targets at each stop before they can continue. And they’ll also face a staggered start — competitors behind the leaders must wait as long as 90 seconds after the leader starts, based on how far behind they are in the standings when the event begins.
And then the modern pentathlon simply becomes chaos. Runners race around a 600-kilometer winding track in the center of the arena, stopping at every lap to shoot. Their shooting scores are displayed on the scoreboard, and when a French shooter registers all the greens — meaning all the targets have been hit — the crowd erupts.
The result of the staggered start is that there is no time comparison, no calculation of how far behind one competitor in a heat might be. Whoever crosses the finish line first is the winner, period. And they are ready to escape from behind enemy lines in the 19th century, should that ever become a problem.
Look, the modern pentathlon is a deeply strange event, a competition still searching for an identity. It can’t decide whether it’s a refined test of athletic prowess or a white-hot, club-music-pumping scene. The music inside the arena on Friday ranged from the soothing spa-style ditties to the ominous West Coast rap of “Still DRE” to the bouncing Europop of Gala’s “Freed from Desire.” It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t need to.
The modern pentathlon is everything the Olympics should be: quirky, challenging, easy to have an opinion about, hard to do yourself. It will be fascinating to see if the sport can evolve to survive at the Olympics after 2028. The horses won’t be there for the next phase of the pentathlon, but hopefully everyone else will.
