EQUESTRIAN: Jessica Kurten, a member of Ireland's gold medal team at the 2001 European show jumping championships, has launched a stinging broadside on the Irish selectors after they named her last week for a World Cup show in Paris more than two months after the French fixture had been cancelled because of lack of funding.

Kurten, who is never shy about voicing her criticism of the selection procedure, flew into Dublin on Saturday from her German base to visit one of her Irish owners, but used the opportunity to air her grievances about the World Cup allocation.

Last week, to her astonishment, Kurten had been informed by an official that she had been selected to jump at both Paris and Dortmund. The Equestrian Federation of Ireland, which co-ordinates international entries once riders have been selected, had faxed a list of World Cup shows and rider preferences to the chairman of selectors, Peter Leonard, on January 8th. The Paris-Bercy fixture, which was scheduled to run from March 7th-9th, was still included in that list, even though the show had been cancelled in November.

"I don't know whether it's incompetence or ignorance, and I mean ignorance in the sense of not knowing," an aggrieved Kurten said, "but everybody's known since the beginning of the World Cup series that Paris was cancelled."

Her comments come hot on the heels of an article in the January 15th edition of German equestrian magazine Pferde Sport International, in which she criticised Irish selection procedures.

Commenting on the controversy, Leonard said yesterday: "We did everything in good faith at the meeting, but at that stage we did not know Paris was cancelled. With that news now we'll have to review it and there will be another meeting to address the situation."

With Kurten now reduced to just the one outing at Dortmund in mid-March, it seems likely that she will be given the opportunity to travel to the last of the qualifiers at the Dutch show in s'Hertogenbosch, although Leonard said the single place available would go to the rider with the best chance of making the cut for the mid-April final in Las Vegas.

The series restarts after the Christmas break at Leipzig in Germany next weekend.