Houston, we have a problem

Houston, we have a problem. And I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks so…. There is little room at the shows for those of us who cannot afford the VIP experience and step up as sponsors. I can’t write a $5,000 check for anything without wincing. Tax time makes me cry. Paying the household bills makes me anxious and causes the occasional panic attack. Read on if you feel my pain.

I grew up horse showing. I was a barn rat (some might say barn brat..but I digress). During my teen years, we horse showed almost every day of the summer. Growing up on Long Island, we would ship into one, two, three and four day shows. It was exhausting. It was addictive. It was fun. I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. Horse show people are my people. Horse people are my people. I’ve tested the theory…it holds up.

I took an almost 20 year break from horse showing (as most of us know it) from the day I left for college until my daughter was 6 years old. In those years, I continued to ride…and ride a lot I did. I did intercollegiate shows. I rode for free anything anyone would give me to ride. I foxhunted. I took my foxhunters to local shows and hunter paces and hunter trials and raced over fences, and it was a $*it ton of fun that I wouldn’t trade for the world. It made me a better rider and a better horseman for sure. During those years horse showing was outside the budget.

When the bug bit me in 2005, It took a few years of being back in it to realize that the horse I had wasn’t nice enough to be competitive at the venues that were nice enough to want to compete at. As luck would have it, in 2010 I found the money to get a WEF quality horse and started wintering in Wellington. I slipped back in with my childhood horse show crowd like I hadn’t been gone a day. In fact, most people didn’t realize I’d been gone . Time flies, and then you blink.

But to this day, I do not have the budget to do WEF like a VIP. I take care of my own horses. I do not have a groom. I sweat (a lot … because these days, the hot flashes don’t help). At the end of the day, I smell so bad that I feel compelled to shower before running to the store to pick up food for dinner so I can feed the family (I look with envy at the youngsters at the store in their riding clothes looking so not disheveled). I run the household and I mind the budget….dining out or taking out on a regular basis will kill my budget. And that wasn’t always the case. Everything has gotten more expensive…not just keeping horses and showing, but food and utilities and gas and healthcare….life. Life is more expensive….but I know enough about how the world works to understand that this is not news…this is inevitable and it makes me feel old to say it because society’s elders are always complaining about rising costs.

But …and I’m getting to the point here….amateurs like me (us…because I know I’m not alone) are being squeezed out of the sport. And that isn’t good for the sport. And the Uber rich who “sponsor” the sport should be more concerned than they are. And the pros and show management seem to recognize the problem, but in their own self interest don’t seem to care about the big picture when they can see a short but prosperous path forward by exploiting the Uber rich today. And it’s not just about the money. Well, maybe it is…It’s about the atmosphere…the whole show experience (which in every way is also about the money).

Clearly, this is a “pay to play” sport. But there’s been a shift, particularly since COVID. Shifts are always subtle…until their cumulative effect is overwhelming. We’ve been creeping in this direction for years. How’s it different now? Horse showing has always been kind of clubby, but there were social opportunities for everyone regardless of financial status. We’d hang out waiting for the jog, and so you knew if you wanted to see people that hanging out at the ring was the thing to do. Ringside was the place to be. Oh, and the exhibitor parties that were…you know…open and free to exhibitors. Going to a show was fun because it was social…a chance to connect with “our people”, which made us all feel connected to the sport. Now we have lost jogs, no one hangs out at the ring. Exhibitor parties have also become pay to play VIP events. I have even gotten email invitations to parties from which I was turned away at the door because I hadn’t paid for the VIP access to the space where the party was being held….and those have been corporate sponsored parties!

Here I am at WEF during WCHR week…a hunter rider with nice amateur horses that are competitive at this venue…and I can’t be bothered. I took this week off. I was invited to a party tonight to watch the Spectacular…at a cost of $250! Thanks, but I’ll watch the livestream from the comfort of my bed..and probably spend the class talking to or texting with some friend who is also watching it similarly positioned. And we will see that the stands are mostly empty. The groups partying ringside will have spent additional hundreds or thousands of dollars for that privilege and most certainly will declare the event a success by focusing on who they saw, without considering who they did not. As participant numbers dwindle, those who can afford to be VIPs should have a little more empathy for those who can’t. Truly, I do not feel like a valued customer at any horse show. It’s not social like it used to be and the opportunities for being social are now even more exclusive than ever.

A terrible analogy is the dilemma of accessibility of higher education to the financially underprivileged…it doesn’t matter if you underwrite their tuition if they have no way to pay room and board. What does the sport lose if it loses the likes of me? It loses invested participants who add to the entries, volunteer, and increase diversity. The people who cut a lot of checks aren’t necessarily out there donating their time. Those who can’t cut checks give back to the sport in other ways. But at this point, I feel like I’m getting less and less from the competitive experience. It has become less and less rewarding because the exhibitor experience has become less and less rewarding for someone on a budget. That’s the result of a lot of factors, and not the fault of any one type of entity. So the solution does not fall upon one group. But I know I am not alone in feeling this way, and I hope that those in a position to consider this angle will pump the brakes on the increasing elitism of the sport and implement some measures to improve accessibility to the non VIPs.