My 5-year-old niece watched the Rolex Kentucky 3-Day Event this weekend, and she was full of questions:
“Why are they jumping that?”
“Is that a boy or a girl horse?”
“Why do they go one at a time?”
“What’s on the horse’s legs?”
As intensely as she watched, my niece didn’t care about the teams or the scoring. She just loved seeing the horses.
We humans have had a long fascination with watching horses. Chariot racing, dressage, jousting, polo, flat racing are spectacles of past ages, and today newer sports like show jumping, reining and eventing reflect the athletic and humane partnership we’ve developed with the horse.
(This sport with cross-country jumps is still figuring out what to name itself, having been called the Military, horse trials, 3-Day, combined training, and — the name that seems to be winning — Eventing.)
Of course, horses are not part of our everyday lives as in the past. The challenge for equestrian sport today is to explain itself, to welcome the public to enjoy the beauty and excitement of horsemanship.
Probably few people could have guessed 100 years ago, as the horse was being released from the plow and carriage, that a future generation would be still be watching horses — on a box of moving pictures, no less — asking the same questions they had once asked.