Absent

Absinthe (Russian: Абсент, named "Absent" in some Russian transcriptions) is a black stallion of the Akhal-Teke breed, born in 1952 in Kazakhstan under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Spotted by Marshal Semyon Budyonny, this son of the stallion Arab obtained the first world record for the number of Olympic titles in the dressage discipline, with Soviet horseriders Sergei Filatov and Yvan Kalita. His performance at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome with Filatov, which earned them the individual gold medal in the discipline, was widely appreciated and commented on, becoming a dressage benchmark. He also helped raise the profile of the Akhal-Teke breed and of Russian equitation. Absinthe is considered the best Olympic sport horse of the 1960s, and the most famous horse in the USSR. He was returned to stud in Kazakhstan by Budyonny after his sporting career, and became the sire of more than sixty foals, several of whom returned to the Soviet dressage team in the 1970s and 1980s. Denomination According to Jean-Louis Gouraud, this horse's original name is "Absinthe" (Абсент), but he is often named "Absent" in Western sources, due to an error in the transcription of the Cyrillic characters from Russian (the Cyrillic characters "Абсент" resemble the Latin characters of the word "Absent"). Thus, the International Federation for Equestrian Sports reference work, Anthology of Equestrian Sports (among other sources), transcribes this horse's name as "Absent" in Latin characters.