The broadcasts of last month’s Torino Winter Olympics always had an expert from each sport adding color commentary, and whenever an American would experience any kind of success, the expert would predict that it was sure to have a positive impact on that sport “back home.”

I got the distinct impression that the various winter sports are all competing for converts, and that high visibility by any attractive young athlete creates a mighty proselytizing opportunity. After all, whoever heard of short-track speed skating before Apolo Anton Ohno?

A similar outreach for converts is constantly at work among the various riding disciplines and breeds. Let’s face the reality that for most of us, it’s not as satisfying that someone likes “horses,” in the generic sense, as it is if they like the same kinds and uses of horses that we do. Two Hanoverian breeders are probably going to have more to chat about on an airplane trip than two seatmates who discover that they breed Morgans and Arabians.

But where to seek out converts to our equestrian cause? In the movie “Top Gun,” two young fighter pilots go into a bar filled with pretty young women. “A target-rich environment!” exclaims one to the other. The primary “target-rich environment” for most English horse sports, except perhaps for polo, is the never-ending flood of young girls who seem to have been genetically pre-ordained to love horses. Just as little boys seem to be born to make tractor and truck noises (at least that’s what my sons and their friends did), so little girls “pop out of the egg” talking to horses.

In 1963 I got a job fresh out of Dartmouth College (N.H.) teaching sixth-grade English at the Far Hills (N.J.) Country Day School. Just about every girl’s schoolbooks were covered with hand-drawn pictures of horses, but not the boys’. Why English riding is such an increasingly single-sex phenomenon I don’t know, but if you’re male, just try to buy boots or riding clothes these days out of the tack-store catalogues. It seems that we’re like the passenger pigeons in their waning years–headed for extinction!

Most of these little girls are “fair game” in that they’re as yet uncommitted about which kind of riding they’ll do. All they know is that they love horses. For some youngsters the choice is predetermined, because a parent or an older sibling is already fully committed. But for most, it’s a question of who gets to them first.

That’s why the leaders of various horse associations cast their nets. What each intuitively understands is that size creates strength and stability, just like the Egyptian pyramids. The key is that the base must be big enough to support the top, so the concept of the pyramidal structure is the perfect analogy for the layers of competitive levels.

What does a large base have to do with the top? The answer is that the percentage of those to rise to the top level of anything is usually quite tiny. Only 3 percent of all race horses win one stakes race–yes, 97 out of 100 never even get close to the top.

I read an article called “The Unwritten Rule of One Half of One Percent,” which postulated that only about one person out of 200 gets especially good at anything. North American eventing has roughly 25,000 participants, give or take a few thousand. There are maybe 125 true advanced-level competitors, and there are perhaps 15 to 20 who approach the elite level. That’s a pretty tiny percentage (about .08%) who have “star quality.” But the bigger the base, the more riders will rise, like cream, to the top. Although the percentage stays tiny, the sheer numbers will grow if the base gets larger.

During one of the ski races at Torino, an announcer made the point that the European countries that have the actual Alps within their boundaries have had a traditionally higher success ratio in the alpine sports than the United States, which lack their intense tradition. To oversimplify it, American kids want to play baseball, football and basketball, whereas Austrian kids want to ski, because they know all about Austria’s great skiing stars.

We saw the same thing in a recent TV movie about the U.S. women’s soccer team. Thousands of teen and pre-teen girls soon idolized Brandy Chastain and Mia Hamm, leading to a dramatic surge in the sport’s popularity.

So, it becomes the old chicken-and-the-egg question. Do the stars build the base, or does the base produce the stars? And to what extent are they interdependent?

Judging from the Torino Olympics, we should never underestimate star power. In riding sports, it’s this star power that ensnares young girls into “our” sport, whether it’sbarrel racing in Wyoming, dressage in California, hunters in Connecticut, eventers in Virginia, or show jumpers in New Jersey.

Eventing in Great Britain has had at least three “superheroes” over the last 30 years: Lucinda Prior-Palmer Green, Virginia Holgate Leng, and now Pippa Funnell. They’re buoyant, approachable, and wildly famous, just the kind to inspire young English girls to become eventers. In American eventing, our current “superhero” is Kim Severson, and photographs of her and similar high-profile athletes in the other riding sports adorn magazine covers everywhere, proclaiming their exploits far and wide.

Men can be cover boys, too, but they’re less effective as proselytizers in the English riding disciplines than in the Western sports.

In sports that are at least 90 percent female, like American eventing and dressage, it behooves the governing organizations to create outreach programs that have the best chances of success. That’s why the Kims, and the Debbie McDonalds and the Pippas are such integral promotional advocates for their respective sports. They create the heightened fascination that only star power has the impact to convey, so that the sport that they represent will prosper and grow, thus making a broader base from which to upwardly propel those 10- to 15-year-olds whose faces we’ll see on the covers of our horse magazines in 2016 or 2026.

Bottom line? Today’s stars create today’s converts.

One or two of those converts, maybe even three or four, but probably not 10 of them, will be the stars of tomorrow, thus perpetuating a continuous cycle of cause and effect, dream and fulfillment.