If there was ever a perfect showcase for horse sports in the United States, it’s the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event, where I spent the last weekend in April. It has all ingredients for a destination event: It’s professionally run, has a family atmosphere, you can see fantastic riding, and it’s in a perfect setting.
I talked to people from all over the country who take their family vacations there. They bring their children just to see some of the best riders in the world show off their horsemanship and competitive skill, and the atmosphere they create is truly inspirational to be around.
Even after competing there for all of these years, it still inspires me to be at Kentucky. I wasn’t riding there this year’a trend that I wouldn’t like to continue’so I got to study the surroundings more, talk to more spectators, and to enjoy the actual event from a different angle. Although I discovered that the trade fair is much, much bigger than I’d imagined, the thing that I came away with more than anything else was people’s desire to be around excellence.
Just think about other sports and how popular they are, compared to our sports. Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, and even rugby all create avid, emotional fans who support their home teams through good times and bad. Something similar happens in our sport, but we just don’t recognize the fans enough.
I’ve been lucky enough to be competitively successful in my riding career, but, still, I was amazed by the outpouring of support for my wife, Karen, and me over the weekend’even though I wasn’t competing. It brought home the fact that most people who are interested in horses want to be part of the sport, even if they cannot compete at the higher levels.
I believe that the sport’and especially we competitors’are generally horrible at being accessible to the public. That’s why I think we need to work on creating and being role models for the kids, for the people who are going to come after us.
People ask me all the time, “How do we bring more sponsors to our sport? What is a sponsor interested in?”
The answer, in its simplest form, is to bring the sponsor’s product or service into the eyes of lots of potential consumers. That means that if we are to attract more sponsors, then we have to attract the public to watch or participate in our sport.
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I will never forget watching the legendary Willie Mays, one of my favorite baseball players, when I was a child. He was the best of his time. I remember watching an interview one time when he said that he always considered himself to be an entertainer. I thought that this was a strange statement at the time, but it’s funny that many years later (and I mean many years) his statement has returned to me.
If we don’t make ourselves attractive to the spectators, like Willie Mays did, how can we get them to come to the event or to watch it on TV?
I’m not suggesting that we need to change the historical aspects of our sports (if you read my last column [March 21, p. 58], you know how I feel on that!). Instead, what I see as a starting point is to make heroes out of our riders and heroes out of our horses.
In all of our horse sports, we need to identify the star riders and help them understand the importance of the media and the spectator, then help them learn to relate to both.
We riders tend to be insular by nature. We spend lots of solitary time with our horses, developing a language and relationship with them that’s hard for other people to understand. Even though other riders may empathize, the relationship between a horseman and his horse is individually treasured.
Since we’re so private by profession, what we do is innately hard to promote in the public marketplace. That’s why I think we need to invest in encouraging our riders to be more open. Our sport may depend on it.
Actually, I have seen it starting to happen in eventing. The weekend after Kentucky I went to the Badminton CCI**** (England) to watch Karen ride, and I noticed that the British riders were very good with the media and at interacting with the public. There were several autograph sessions at sponsor tents that were hugely popular. Even some of the younger riders are starting to realize the potential, not only for them personally, but also, I hope, for the future of the sport.
Since we live our professions in the public eye, sports people are held to a higher plane of behavior than pretty much everyone else, except politicians. Some athletes welcome this as a responsibility of their profession, but some shy away and say it doesn’t matter. I think that it does matter, for it is the public that, in the end, pays for us to achieve our competitive goals.
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We have to live with that responsibility. Being a role model’in one form or another’is simply a part of the game.
Now, I realize that not everyone is as comfortable in the public eye as some others of us, and we all need to respect those who are more private. But we must find the riders who are comfortable in the public arena and use them to help us all ex-pand the sport.
In order to develop the more public personalities’both human and equine’I recommend that we do the following:
First, our new federation (the U.S. Equestrian Federation, of which I’ll be the new president), perhaps in concert with the U.S. Olympic Committee, should offer media and public-relations training to all high-performance athletes. In fact, I think it should be mandatory.
Second, we need to identify the riders who are both competitively successful, in any discipline but especially the Olympic disciplines, and who are good with the public. And then we need to use them to promote their sports or teams, or just to promote horse sports in general.
Third, we have to turn our great horses into the stars or heroes that they should be. Of course, I think of the great partners Karen and I have had, like Giltedge, Custom Made and Biko. And there are many others competing now or recently retired who should be heroes, like Brentina, Relevant or Graf George in dressage; Gem Twist, For The Moment, Rhythmical and Fein Cera in show jumping; and Rox Dene or Strapless in the hunters. We should make baseball-type trading cards for them, use them in demonstrations, put them on TV’the list is endless.
If we can encourage top athletes to look beyond their own business and help us all promote our sport, then I believe that horse sports can be successful in front of the public and in the sponsorship marketplace.