Friends, it’s time for the much anticipated conclusion to our blogger contest. By much anticipated I mean slightly more anticipated than the release of the next iPhone, and we won’t break your heart like Apple. We’ll publish all of the final submissions and then release the winner at the end. In this round, we asked the finalists to write about money in eventing. Let’s get things started off with Karen McCollom, and you can read Karen’s previous submissions for the contest here. Leave your votes about the post below to help pick the winner and of course the next Eventing Nation writer.
Entry: Show Me The Money
Money in eventing; the very phrase is an oxymoron. There is no money in eventing. Well, actually, there IS money in eventing, but it’s all being spent.
I was recently speaking with Laurie Hudson who runs 6 events a year out of her Hitching Post Farm in Vermont. We were having a serious, analytical discussion about how she manages the finances of these horse trials. We were both getting a little bored with the conversation. I finally asked her why she ran the events in the first place. After a long-ish pause, she replied with glee, “Because I LIKE it!.”
This is the real bottom line. You can analyze and ponder spread sheets and compare one activity against another in terms of income, but the reason that anyone is involved in eventing, professionals, amateurs, beginners and experts, event organizers, sponsors and owners is because they LIKE it. There is very little financial sense to any of this participation. In fact, it makes no sense at all.
To be sure all these financially aberrant participants are forced to come up with some sort of income flow, or, at the very least, to prevent income from other sources from flowing too rapidly down the equine spending river. (Please notice I refrained from saying “down the drain”).
If you are an organizer, like Laurie Hudson, you can avoid spending actual money by bartering for goods and services : cross country schooling privileges in return for course design, horse training for a judge’s fee. The big events hunt down corporate sponsors by cleverly convincing them in some way that there actually IS money in eventing.
If you are a rider you can grow up and get a job in the real world to pay for your horse habit. If your real job is being a rollerskating waitress at A and W and only pays gas money, you can, like Laurie’s students, barter as well. You can trade mucking or mowing, gardening or cooking or website management, knitting or dog grooming for lessons and board.
The other option for a rider is to embark on the somewhat sketchy proposition of having your riding habit become your real job. You can become a professional rider. Here is where the income trickle relative to the flood out becomes even more turbulent. Those guys who show up at events in huge travelling circusmobiles with 47 horses and 28 hot and cold running students have owners who have real jobs or at least real income from the real world to support their riding habits and even riding dreams. Thus the big pros depend on other peoples’ real income for their own income. I’m not sure if this counts as money in eventing.
Commercial sponsors play some part in stemming the outflow for these guys, mostly in the form of cool stuff. Often, at least in the U.S., although it looks cool, this stuff only takes the form of flashy decals or sweat-free shirts and free saddle pads. A drop in the bucket. In Europe, on the other hand, sometimes the circusmobiles themselves come from corporate sponsors and sometimes even the horses inside. Much more than a drop in the bucket; pretty much the bucket itself!
The more mortal professionals, the ones whose Olympic visions are more dreams than actual goals, scrabble along however they can to stem the tide of that outward flowing river of money. Some become judges or TD’s, they sell horses and teach tons of clinics. These clinics are paid for by those of us who have real jobs to pay for our riding habit, even if our real job is as a rollerskating waitress.
Apparently, eventing depends not so much on money, but on us eventing junkies,and this includes everyone who has ever sent a horse down the center line in any form, judged a horse as it comes down the center line, or had anything at all to do with a horse on that endless center line. The nonsense that defines eventing finances is fueled only by our willingness to borrow and trade, to give and take, and to work our butts off for a return not rationally measurable with dollar signs.
