“It’s not a sport” they say.
“Does it even take muscle?” they ask.
“It takes skill but it doesn’t take strength” they assume.
If I could put every single human being that said one of these things on a well trained horse and ask them to be able to control it beautifully, elegantly, and still manage to take it over a 3 foot fence they’d be wishing they were dead.
“The horse does all the work” they state. No horse chooses to canter or gallop or even trot for heavens sake when there’s a human casually sitting on it’s back. If you let go of the reins you wanna’ know the first place my horse is going to go? The nearest food source. If food isn’t near by then she's going to paw the ground and slowly fall to the arena sand where she will take a nice roll. So that doesn’t make much sense does it… how do I control where she is going if it’s not with the reins? FREAKING GOD DAMN LEG MUSCLES HUN. That’s how. Legs. How do you slow down? That’s when abdominals and butt muscles come into play. Still don’t believe me? Then how can I ride my horse in a circle, cantering with no saddle, no bridle, and my hands in the air?
Video courtesy to Arielle Smith
I honestly have no idea how it came about that people think that controlling an animal that’s 10 times larger than you is easy. Since when has it been easy for some one to move something that weighs 1,000 plus pounds? That’s what I thought, never.
So everyone that still thinks that being an equestrian isn’t a sport, I have a question for you. Is soccer a sport?
Of course soccer is a sport! You run very fast and you have to have a lot of stamina and be a fast runner. But you also must have skill to get the soccer ball to go where you want it to go!
Okay, well take this from a girl that played soccer seriously and competitively for 8 years. I never once got as sore from playing soccer as I do riding. Soccer is in our comfort zone as human beings. When a mom puts her little kid on a soccer field they don’t know that they have it easy. Everyone gasps when the soccer ball hits a kid in the gut. But nobody ever died from a blow to the face from a ball. But when parents allow for their kids to sign up for riding lessons they sign a waver. The waver reads something along the lines of ‘you may not sue if your kid dies taking place in this activity.’ Then they watch as their kid gets on to an animal with a mind of its own. A beast.
Riding takes more energy, more muscle, more skill, than any other sport I have ever experienced, you just can’t even compare it to a sport as rigorous and riding.
