The burden of modern pentathlon is not small: the complete athlete is a versatile soldier.
This is how the pillar saint of modern sport, Pierre de Coubertin, imagined it when the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) invented a sport after the revival of the Olympic Games.
How it was back then: Only officers were allowed to act out the military drama in which they presented riding into the enemy front, losing their horse and fighting their way through with sword and pistol, swimming and finally running.
Crew ranks were excluded, the participation of women unthinkable.
No sport can be more from yesterday.
One would like to know whether IOC boss Thomas Bach also consulted Coubertin on the pentathlon question, as he once did when visiting the bust at night when the spiritual advisor agreed to the modernization of the Olympic motto, as Bach said.
After all, the battle for his inheritance is intense.
Not only has the craft of war suffered a certain loss of prestige, but also as a result of Putin's attack on Ukraine and its citizens.
Even the less sensitive handling of the pentathlete Annika Schleu with her visibly distraught horse caused such outrage among television viewers of the Tokyo Games last summer that the status of the sport as an Olympic sport was suddenly endangered.
The solution should be a spectacle.
Instead of driving horses over obstacles, the modernized pentathletes of the 2028 era are expected to throw themselves onto the course at the Los Angeles Games.
The discipline is called "Obstacle Course Race", in German: extreme obstacle course.
It goes over ramparts and mountains of tires, through deep sand and muddy broth, also between electric wires whose electric shocks knock over grown men, and jumping over blazing flames.
With this idea, the association praises, the marketing experts have fulfilled their conditions, above all those of continuing Coubertin's narrative of the complete athlete.
Other advantages: No Olympic sports association claims rights to this discipline, it can be realized without great effort and is, at least according to the experts, attractive and relevant for the younger and for future generations.
Only the few athletes who can afford the luxury of doing five different sports at a very high level, quite a few at the expense of their state and its army, see no future in it.
You're right.
It's not about her.
The federation is struggling to defend its position in the Olympic program and to keep its foot in the door with broadcasters and sponsors.
He claims a place that his sport, which has become obsolete and irrelevant, is no longer entitled to.