Is this the next big thing for teen and pre-teen girls?
The very first competitive hobbyhorse riding contest in the U.S. will be held in a Middle School gym in Michigan this weekend, and while there isn't a lot of buzz around the event, girls from across the country are expected to compete.
When I first heard that there was actually a sport called competitive hobbyhorse riding, I thought for a moment that I had been transported into an alternate universe. But no, it's true.
VIDEO: Straddle a wooden stick decorated with a pretend, but laboriously decorated, horse's head and off you go as if you were riding a real horse. Hobby horsing is an unofficial sport but one that is taken very seriously by thousands of enthusiasts around the world. pic.twitter.com/suQVteduTs
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) June 25, 2024
“It’s so much more difficult than people think,” says 13-year-old Mirabelle Whitman, another of the Michigan competition’s organizers. Of that, I'm sure. Thirteen-year-old girls have a wonderful ability to make the most difficult physical challenges appear effortless. Just watch young gymnasts if you don't believe me.
Finland is a mecca of competitive hobbyhorse riding. At the June contest this year, there were more than 300 riders and 1,600 spectators. No word on how many sponsors they have because they won't make it an Olympic sport unless there are plenty of sponsors to slap their name on horse and rider.
I am very jealous of the Wall Street Journal's Sarah Needleman who was actually assigned to write this story.
“They have four legs and we have two,” says Mica of the difference between when a horse and a person performs a traditional equestrian move such as a piaffe, a form of rhythmic high-stepping in place.
The contest is slated to last eight hours and feature seven disciplines including dressage (a multistep routine usually set to music) and barrel racing (moving in a cloverleaf pattern around three cylinders). Other challenges involve jumping over the kind of horizontally arranged poles seen in dog-agility courses.
While it might sound like a scene from a Monty Python movie, excelling at competitive hobbyhorse riding requires athleticism and some contenders pay for training. Riders are expected to clear poles as tall as the ones that men’s hurdlers leap over in the Olympics—3½ feet—all the while holding their stick horses. The hobbyhorse world record, set in 2019, is 4 feet 6 inches, per the Finnish Hobbyhorse Association.
Paula Kutvonen of Finland is considered the master craftsman of hobbyhorse construction. “She is the queen,” Mirabelle says. “She makes the Rolls-Royces of hobbyhorses,” adds her mother. The horses go for around $250. More elaborately decorated stick ponies can cost as much as $650 and up.
You might not realize it, but hobbyhorse riding can be a dangerous sport. Not like auto racing or anything like break dancing, but injuries have been known to happen.
“People play rough with them,” she says.
Indeed, hobbyhorse riders have torn muscles and broken bones engaging in the sport.
“Don’t ever go into training without stretching and drinking water,” says Mica, who twisted a leg last year while galloping around a mostly empty parking lot.
Sarah Angelisanti, 13, plans to travel by car to the contest in Michigan with her parents from their farmhouse in Allentown, Pa. She got into hobbyhorse riding after discovering the sport on YouTube. She spent about $500 of money she earned doing chores on a hobbyhorse that resembles Kitty, her real chestnut equine.
What does the horse Kitty think of her toy hobbyhorse? “She doesn’t give it much interest, because she’s a horse,” says Sarah.
Ah. The wisdom of children.
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