Paris Olympics: It’s wild … it’s weird … it’s the modern pentathlon and it’s everything the Olympics ought to be

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 world’s finest basketball players, but how would he do with a sword in his hand? Simone Biles is a magnificent gymnast, but what if she had to run a race while firing a laser gun?

The Olympics does a fine job of identifying the finest athletes in individual sports. But there’s only one event — a strange little outlier of an event — that identifies the best athletes in multiple sports. Where else can you see the world’s best try their hands at swordplay, horse jumping, shooting, running and swimming, all in 90 minutes’ time?

There’s a purity to the modern pentathlon. Like the heptathlon and the decathlon, it uses a combo platter of skills to assess the greatest athletes. But it’s also a determinedly out-of-step competition, designed to crown the 19th century’s definition of a well-rounded athlete. The five disciplines that comprise the modern pentathlon carry a certain elegance to them; a truly modern pentathlon would probably include competitive eating, Wordle and Power Slap.

Because of its archaic nature — and because the use of horses in athletic competition has gone very much out of style — the Paris Olympics mark the last time that the modern pentathlon will exist in its current format. The horse element of the pentathlon will be removed, to be replaced with an “American Ninja Warrior”-style obstacle course. And even that might not be enough to save the sport’s Olympic fortunes; modern pentathlon is not yet guaranteed a spot on the 2032 Brisbane slate.

Which would be a shame, because the modern pentathlon is exactly the kind of event that the Olympics ought to cherish.

How modern pentathlon was created

The modern pentathlon was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who created the Olympic Games. His aim was to test all elements of a man’s military skill; modern pentathlon was restricted to men only all the way until 2000. The modern pentathlon even has its own little hypothetical backstory: Imagine a soldier trapped behind enemy lines. What would that soldier need to know and do to escape? Run, shoot, swordfight, swim and ride a horse, of course, assuming he was captured prior to the invention of the automobile or the cell phone.

Originally contested over the course of five days, the modern pentathlon was compacted into a single day starting with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. This year, after a preliminary fencing competition out at the arena used for boxing, the modern pentathlon takes place entirely in the space of about 100 minutes at the Versailles equestrian arena, a frantic whipsaw of events popular enough to sell out the massive stands on Friday.

The modern pentathlon proper begins with a horse-jumping discipline, and this is where the pentathlon has hit its choppiest waters in recent years. Animal rights advocates have long challenged and criticized the use of animals in human competition for a range of reasons, starting with the safety, security and well-being of the horses.

Modern pentathlon spent much of the 2010s trying to justify its Olympic existence, and an incident in Tokyo in 2021 might well have spelled the end of the sport as an Olympic event.

Horses are randomly assigned to competitors, 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 outraged pretty much everyone from athletes to activists to organizers, and the sport’s future was clear: After Paris 2024, no more horses.

Officials with the International Modern Pentathlon Union (UIPM) sorted through about 60 possible replacement disciplines, settling at last on obstacle racing. Officials earlier this week tried to spin this forward as an attempt to appeal to the youth rather than a way to distance the sport from charges of equine abuse.

“That’s a perfect product for the TV audience for the same kind of facilities,” said Shiny Fang, UIPM secretary general. “You don’t need to feed the horses, of course, and there are already a lot of specific obstacle clubs with all these facilities. Already many athletes are able to train and compete.”

A tribute to horses

Friday’s competition begins 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 up on the white sands of the equestrian arena’s infield, and shortly after 1 p.m, a bell tolls to begin the discipline. Riders must take their new horse friend over 12 of the jumps, with points awarded for grace, positioning and speed. Most of the horses proceed through the course without incident, though a couple come up short and knock down crossbars or — in one particularly unfortunate case — an entire post. The riders pat their horses’ necks as they leave the arena, and then they’ve got only minutes to prepare for the next event: fencing.

The key to the modern pentathlon is speed; events come and go in rapid succession. There’s no time for extended tournaments; it’s fight and go. The preliminary event, held the day before the semifinals, is the fencing equivalent of speed dating — every competitor faces off against every other competitor in a series of one-touch bouts. That seeds them for the next day’s events.

On Friday, workers at the arena raise an entire fencing stadium — air-filled, like a giant bounce house — from the sand after the horses finish up. From there, fencing goes from speed dating to survive-and-advance — the 18th-place competitor battles the 17th-place one, and the winner of that faces the 16th seed, and so on. For the first few bouts, matters proceed in chalky order, but then No. 10 seed Emiliano Hernandez of Mexico goes on a run, winning five straight bouts before falling. No. 5 seed Valentin Prades of France thrills the crowd by running the table and knocking off the top four seeds 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 at the Versailles arena right next to the equestrian sands. However, it’s a 25-meter pool — the size of your average neighborhood pool — meaning the competitors will need to swim eight lengths in a pool that looks like it ought to have a lifeguard, deck chairs and a couple kids ready to play Marco Polo.

The final two events — running and shooting — are combined into one event called “Laser Run,” which is cool but not as cool as its name would suggest. 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 the competitors get a few minutes after they dry off to prepare with the lasers.

Their goal in these final two events: run 3,000 kilometers — just under two miles — with four stops at shooting stations. They must hit five targets each stop before they can move on. And they’re also facing a staggered start — competitors behind the leaders must wait as much as 90 seconds after the leader begins, based on how far back they are in the standings when the event begins.

And then the modern pentathlon just becomes chaos. Runners race over a winding 600-kilometer track in the center of the arena, stopping to shoot at every lap. Their shooting scores are shown on the scoreboard, and when a French shooter records all greens — signifying all targets hit — the crowd erupts.

The result of the staggered start is that there’s no matching of times, no calculating how far one competitor in one heat might be behind another. Whoever crosses the finish line first is the winner, full stop. And they’re ready to escape from behind enemy lines in the 19th century, should that ever become an issue.

Look, the modern pentathlon is a deeply strange event, a competition still in search of an identity. It can’t decide whether it’s a refined test of athletic prowess or a glowing, club-music-pumping scene. The music on Friday at the arena ran the gamut from spa-style calming tunes to the ominous West Coast rap of “Still D.R.E.” to the bouncy Europop of Gala’s “Freed from Desire.” It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then, it didn’t really need to.

The modern pentathlon is everything the Olympics ought to be — quirky, challenging, easy to hold opinions on, hard to do yourself — and it will be fascinating to see if the sport can evolve to survive in the Olympics past 2028. The horses won’t be along for the next stage of the pentathlon’s journey, but hopefully everyone else will.