I was first put on a horse at age three, and didn’t get off for the next fifteen years. But when I graduated high school, I quit cold turkey. I didn’t get on a horse again for ten years—ten dark, dark years. When I say I took ten years off, I mean it. I had never heard of SmartPak, and had unsubscribed from the Dover Saddlery catalog. I was so out of it, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a short format!
Two years ago I started up again, and I love it as much as or more than I ever did before, but I didn’t expect to have such a different perspective on the sport. Once I realized how much I’d missed, I went full steam ahead, reading and learning. Ninety percent of the posts in my Facebook feed are from Denny Emerson, maybe 10 percent from people I actually know. I’m twice the age I was when I quit, with a completely different set of morals, values, goals, and friends. Since I run almost exclusively in non-horsey circles now, I talk about eventing to the few friends who will listen, but I have to explain it to them. Since I’m not competing, I think people assume I just amble around like they did on that trail ride they took during a family vacation, and a lesson is me learning to stay on. Well, in a way, it is. But I try very hard to convince them that it’s a SPORT and I’m an ATHLETE. I say, Did you see the Olympics? I do that! Well, it’s a little bit like that. Not really, but that’s what I look like in my mind.
I also find myself justifying the existence of the sport, something I never would have done or been asked to do as a young adult. I have to assure people that the horses don’t hate it, that they are doing it of their own free wills, that the enormous amount of resources that are used raising and competing horses is…worth it? I suppose I ask myself those questions sometimes. Eventually, I just throw up my hands and I say, “WHO CARES! It’s fun as hell!” I pull up some YouTube cross-country videos and just make gestures at the screen as if to say, “I mean…look at this.”
What other sport has to justify its reason for being? What other group of athletes has to constantly remind outsiders that they aren’t just rich people with too much time on their hands? (Show of hands for those who fit that description here.) Now, with the recent news of PETA’s condemnation of the sport, will I have to assure my non-horsey friends that it truly isn’t animal abuse?
I’m going to start saying this to people who have these concerns: Go watch a few beginner novice cross country rounds. You tell me if you’ve ever seen a kid (or a middle-aged woman!) smile that big. Watch the riders get off their noble, willing steeds and give their giant sweaty necks a big hug. I have never seen anything make anyone as happy as riding horses makes us. And the horses don’t mind it too much, either. I’ve been out of competition for a while, but even now, when I get something right in a lesson—no matter how simple—I’m smiling for days after. It is absolutely intoxicating in the best possible way. What further justification do you need?
