In honor of the first Rocking Horse event of the new year, we're bringing back one of our favorite posts from the archives. Enjoy!
A depiction of a typical event weekend for Buck Davidson. Illustration by Lindsey Kahn.
I was perusing the ride timetable for the Rocking Horse Winter I Horse Trials this weekend, and I couldn’t help but stare at Buck Davidson’s ride times for a few minutes. If I’m being honest, I think I went a little cross-eyed trying to make sense of it all. As has become a Buck tradition it seems, the man had 9 rides this weekend.
That’s 27 trips in the saddle. While I do understand that Buck is a consummate professional, I immediately felt weak and fatigued at the thought of 9 rides crammed into 36 hours.
Then I looked past the sheer number of rides to the timetable of how this all went down. After numerous graphs and diagrams, I eventually gave up on trying to make sense of how this was going to happen successfully. Take a look for yourself (this has been updated for the 2016 Rocking Horse I times!):
Buck’s ride times for the first Rocking Horse of 2016.
Makes you a little dizzy, doesn’t it? Since we were feeling at bit lost at the thought of how many working students it would take to make this operation run, Lindsey and I put our heads together and thought we would pay tribute to Buck: the man, the myth, the legend. As Lindsey so thoughtfully illustrated above, it would only make sense to have some sort of map like this drawn out ahead of time so that everyone involved knew where they had to be and when.
Buck, we don’t know how you do it. We don’t know how any of you pros do it, actually. Give me one horse and three ride times and I already have enough anxiety to last me a full week. So thank you, Buck, and every other pro and working student out there who make our heads spin with the sheer amount of dedication you show to your job. We salute you!
