There can hardly be greater disappointment for a Grand Prix dressage rider than traveling all the way to worlds just to find out your horse can’t compete after all.

At the 2014 Alltech World Equestrian Games (WEG) here in Normandy, France, that’s been the fate of four dressage riders so far. Sunday morning’s bright and early trot inspection landed two horses back in the barn: Kazakhstan’s Donpetro and Norway’s Carte d’Or. 

Then Tuesday afternoon, bad luck struck Brazil’s Luiza Tavares de Almeida when the judges rang the bell on her Lusitano, Pastor, just seconds after their test began. The 18-year-old bay stallion entered the dressage ring “clearly lame in the hindquarters, and quite uncomfortable,” according to Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) judge Stephen Clarke (GBR). “He looked fine just before,” Clarke told me after the competition.

But pas de chance in France for Tavares de Almeida—her Pastor must have made a funny move or somehow injured himself between the time he was preparing just around the ring and the time he moved in to start the test