Been away for two weeks and just about caught up. But have to show you this astonishing achievement by a very avid horseback rider. Will wonders never cease? A fabulous Halloween week picture from Central Park, NY by Bill Cunningham:
Archive for category horseback riding
Major Mongolian Sports
Sep 11
The Naadam festival is the biggest festival of the year for Mongolians. Usually occurring in July, it runs for three days in all parts of the country and highlights the greatest athletes in horse racing, archery, and wrestling: Mongolia’s most popular sports. Women participate in all but the wrestling category. The word Naadam means game or competition in Mongolian. Competitions take place on the first two days, and merry-making is reserved for the third.
This festival has been held for centuries as a form of memorial celebration, as an annual sacrificial ritual honoring various mountain gods or to celebrate a community endeavor.

soldiers participate in the opening ceremony in Ulaan Bataar
The festivities kick off with a colorful parade of athletes, monks, soldiers marching in perfect uniformity, musicians performing powerful military tunes, and Mongolians dressed in Chinggis-style warrior uniforms.
HORSE RACING
Mongolians have a high regard for horses, which they have relied on for centuries for transport, sustenance, and companionship. During the races, up to 1,000 horses can be chosen to compete. The horse races are broken down into six categories based on the age of the horses. For example, two-year-old horses race for 10 miles and seven-year-olds for 17 miles. The race is conducted on the open grasslands with no set track or course. Children from the ages of 5 to 13 are chosen as jockeys, because this guarantees that the race tests the horses’ skill and not the riders.

18 mile race, no saddles, jockeys all under 13 years old
The small size of the jockeys also increases the horses’ endurance. Even still, jockeys train for months before Naadam, and the horses are given a special diet. The winning jockey is praised with the title tumny ekh or “leader of ten thousand” and the five winning horses are talked about and revered in poetry and music. The losing two-year-old horse is also alloted special attention by being serenaded with a song. Music is very important before the race too, as the audience sings traditional songs and the the jockeys sing a pre-race song called a gingo.
Eating and drinking is the other “sport” during the Naadam festival. The horse races are held in the steppes, behind people who stop to drink tea and airag, fermented mares’ milk, cold meat pancakes, and other popular festival foods.
WRESTLING
The wrestling competitions begin around noon on the first day of the festival and end on the second day. They are quite unlike American wrestling matches in form, and they have two other important differences. First, there are no weight divisions. A small wrestler can be pitted against someone two times his weight. This can lead to some very interesting matches. Second, there are no time limits.
The loser of a match is the wrestler who falls first. A fall is when any part of a wrestler’s body, except his hands or feet, touches the ground.

colorful and traditional wrestling at Naadam
Titles are given to winners of a number of rounds: Falcon to those winning five rounds, Elephant for seven rounds, and Lion to the one winning the whole tournament.
One elite wrestler was once given the title “Eye-Pleasing Nationally Famous Mighty and Invincible Giant.” Wrestlers honor the judges and their attendants with a dance called devekh, or eagle dance. The winner also performs the eagle dance after the loser of the bout takes off his jacket and walks under the winner’s arm. Wrestlers wear small, over-the-shoulder vests called zodog, and snug shorts called shuudag. The heavy, traditional Mongolian boots are called gutuls.
ARCHERY
The sport of archery originated around the 11th century. Contestants dress in traditional costumes and use a bent bow constructed of horn, bark, and wood. The arrows, made from willow branches and vulture feathers are shot at round, leather targets with grey, yellow or red rings. Men must stand 75 meters and women 60 meters from the target. Judges, standing near the targets, assess each shot with a cry, called a uukhai, and a raised hand. The winning archer, or mergen, is the one who hits the targets the most times. As close as the judges stand to the targets, none of them appears to ever be hit by an arrow.
Incidentally one of the advantages the Mongols had during their conquests is that their double-curved bows were made of many components and different materials and could launch an arrow farther (500 yards), faster and more powerfully (can penetrate steel armor) than the famous single-curved, English longbow (350 yards) used by other cultures. This meant they could decimate their enemies without risking a response. The Mongol bow is harder to draw, so men had to develop upper-body strength from boyhood. They also learned how to shoot from a horse in any direction, even facing backwards.
Well I finally heard of Prancercise. I only went to France for a week, but one author said, “Wait, what’s prancercise? Have you been living in Pyongyang or something? It’s an exercise routine inspired by horses, featuring such moves as “the prancercise gallop” and “the prancercise box” as well as some incredible rhymes by its instructor and founder, Rohrback, decked out in a crisp salmon jacket and some very revealing white pants:
“We’re gonna really cut the noose and let it loose, with the prancercise gallop.” ”
Joanna Rohrback knows you are laughing at her, and she doesn’t care.
She’s aware that people think her exercise routine “Prancercise” is “goofy,” and that by extension its founder must be “spooky and goofy and weird and wacky. I say bring it on. I love it. Look at all the attention it’s getting me. If I wasn’t all those things, I wouldn’t be who I am.”
You can see the original routine below, and you can read more right here .
My friend Carolyn wrote, “This video is for a horse lover like you. This was my fantasy horse when I was 9. Still is.” Even if you are not into horses, the magnificence and poetic, flowing motion of these Friesians will lift your spirits and bring you close to flowing tears. In the midst of bad news and a down couple of days, I am positively grateful for this gift from a friend in California.
Here is some background:
The Koninklijk Friesch Paarden-Stamboek (Dutch: Royal Friesian Horse Studbook (KFPS) is the oldest studbook in the Netherlands and promotes the interests of the Friesian horse. The KFPS has been realizing this by the meticulous registration of Friesian horses since the time it was founded in 1879. In addition, the KFPS has established a breeding program to maintain and further refine the unique characteristics of the Friesian horse.
The KFPS is an international studbook with 15,000 members of which almost half are located outside of the Netherlands. Friesian horses can be found on every continent and in more than fifty countries.
The interest in the Friesian horse has exploded in recent decades. As a result, the breed now has a population of 60,000 registered horses. More and more horse lovers are impressed by their regal bearing, their suitability for both recreational and professional equestrian sports, and their friendly character.

Hiroshi Hoketsu, age 71, is this Olympics' oldest competitor
The female gymnasts are often children, just 15 or 16 years old. But here is a story by Martin Rogers about the oldest competitor in this year’s Olympics, a Japanese equestrian who is 71. Most impressive is that he says “I am a better rider at 70 than I was at 40.”
The oldest competitor at the 2012 Olympic Games has revealed the extraordinary sacrifices he has made in order to remain a medal contender well past retirement age.
Hiroshi Hoketsu, who will represent Japan in the equestrian discipline of dressage at the age of 71, told Yahoo! Sports how chasing a slice of history and becoming the oldest Olympian in the last 92 years is the result of a fanatical commitment to the sport.
“I have not seen my wife, Motoko, for more than a year,” said Hoketsu, who lives and trains in the German town of Aachen in order to team up with his horse, Whisper, and his Dutch coach. “It is difficult to be away from home for this long as an old man and I owe everything to her patience and understanding.”
Hoketsu will take part in his third Olympics, 48 years after making his debut and finishing 40th as a show jumper on home soil at the 1964 Tokyo Games. Despite continuing to rise at 5 a.m. every day to ride horses, he quit competing and became a successful international businessman for pharmaceutical companies.
After hanging up his business suit and briefcase, Hoketsu still had the itch to compete and entered the world of competitive dressage at his wife’s insistence. At the time, neither predicted his comeback would result in qualification for the Beijing Games four years ago and now the London Games.
Hoketsu credits his performances to dedication and a bond with his mount that he describes as “magical.” He has become a star in his homeland and a poster boy for the elderly.
Although Hoketsu rises early every morning and attacks practice sessions with as much zeal as riders young enough to be his grandchildren, he confesses he does not adhere to the dietary regimen you might expect from an Olympic athlete.
“I eat what I want to eat and drink as much as I want to drink,” said Hoketsu through an interpreter. “People might expect that I am able to participate for so long because I have special habits. But my secret is to have a good life, enjoy yourself and do the things that make you happy.
“Having said that, I am out there riding horses every day for several hours. Then I come back in and do many exercises, to help with my strength, coordination, and, most importantly, my balance.”
Hoketsu is the oldest Olympian since Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn won bronze at the age of 72 at the 1920 Antwerp Games and would ride into the record books if he was able to qualify for the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.
Such an outcome is unlikely, but don’t rule it out just yet.
“My wife would like for this to be my last year of competition and that will probably be the case,” Hoketsu said. “But I still feel my riding is improving, little by little. That is my motivation. I am a better rider at 70 than I was at 40. Most people can’t tell but my body is getting a little weaker. My horse knows it and she helps me.”
Murmuration from Islands & Rivers on Vimeo.
Three animal encounters all happened last week that merge in my mind and involve coordinated movement of birds, fish and horses. You decide if my capture of “wild” horses qualifies as an “athletic achievement.”
The video above (start at 30 seconds) of a murmuration (flock of starlings) was sent to me by my cousin Alan. Of course I thought how much the birds looked like a school of fish, which also move together with millisecond feedback responses.
Then I reread the short story Mar Nueva by Mark Helprin in his collection The Pacific about an 11-year-old boy who fishes off a Mediterranean dock. Helprin writes:
“In the deep and luminous world of the sea, fleets of huge fish circle the globe, neither breaking the surface nor touching bottom but suspended in silent layers of shadowy green and blue, rising a mile or falling two, fighting noiseless battles in great societies of which we have never even dreamed.

school of bluefins
…a vast school of bluefin passed by…the waves were broken by their churning, and they crowded the entire bay, seething underwater for as far as I could see. For all I knew, the school was as wide as five days’ sailing and as long as ten…”
The boy catches 30 bluefin that he tethers to the pier. “They weighed as much as I did (up to 110 pounds)…I was afraid to fall among them. I even wondered if they might destroy the pier…I had a strong urge to let them go. Because freedom can be understood only as the absence of restraint…I valued freedom insufficiently…their movements were so sad and aimless that I knew I had to cut them loose…they had become as patient as dogs on a hot afternoon.” When freed, “they would circle in confusion among the pilings until they found an opening to the sea and sped away.”
Then two days ago I looked out my second floor window to the hayfield and saw two horses roaming freely in the five-foot high grass, giddy escapees from their customary paddock. Needing to corral them before they ran down the road to passing cars or into the forest to be lost for hours, I entered the field, while a friend with grain in flip flops at the edge told me where they were in the uneven terrain. With both arms out wide like a living cross, I attempted to aim them back towards the barn, but they kept turning in perfect synchronization, left, right, back, left, right. In the undulating terrain, they would disappear for long periods, and my higher-perched friend would yell me their location. A stranger appeared who though concerned was also delighted like the horses: “Free and wild, free and wild,” she sang out melodiously while smiling. She turned out to be a substitute vet.

imagine chasing two of these giants (5.5 feet tall to the back) in an open field
Though I did hear crashing in the forest, it must have been deer, because I eventually found the horses, who had exited one end of the field through a barway in the stone wall and were eating grass on the lawn near the vegetable garden. With grain in hand, I was able to seduce these giant Cleveland Bays to let me close enough to rope their necks and return them to their stalls. On the way, I could see the break in the fence, where they had pushed past a rotten post while leaning over the wood for fresh grass. The whole adventure lasted under an hour, filled with tension, beauty, and the sensation of being in a dream, a hair commercial, and an outtake for the movie, Horse Whisperer. Wish these magical moments of poetry and challenge had been filmed. Above is a generic photo of what these rare, endangered horses look like.
Millions of people ride horses, a sport that has its exciting and dangerous moments. Kids start when they’re less than five, and I have a friend who sees riders in her barn in their late 80’s. I have another friend who at age 56 took up hunter-jumping, did endurance riding (25 miles in a day) in Arizona, then fell jumping back East, broke her back, healed, studied dressage, then reining, and is now learning western. She is a Greenwich suburbanite who is on a horse almost every day of the last 10 years. Now that is enthusiasm.

helmet on ira on Moose—2004
But I think in this sport, it is common. Horse riders—whether world class or simply local barn level— are often so committed to their sport that almost nothing will stop them from daily or frequent practice. They seem obsessed, blessed and are to be admired for their devotion and envied for their passion. I think more of them are women than men, but no matter how quiet and timid some of these ladies seem at a dinner table, they are determined to ride. I met such a female some years ago who rode every day for 17 years, driving to her horse’s barn a half hour or so away even in rainstorms and winter blizzards. She had to ride, even if it was indoors. Not mounting her horse daily was not an option. It was her life.
My first and only horse, Moose, an Arab-Percheron cross, died last year at age 27. But we had many great years of riding in the woods, pastures, jumping, and just being buddies. He only threw me a couple times, and could have often, when he was startled by a flushed grouse or a static tractor that he noticed. I was pretty good at shifting weight, squeezing legs and hanging on in a fraction of a frightening milli-second.
I always wore a helmet, as silly as it looked for me to be adorned in black velvet head gear on the road or plain dirt trail. But I was cautious, being brand new at the game, having only bought Moose when I was 50. I made myself learn to ride English, so I couldn’t hold on to a Western saddle horn when my horse cantered or galloped. At one point I was taking two-foot jumps bareback. Not bad for an old geezer in his mid-50’s.
With this simple background, I was very saddened to read that an Olympic rider, Courtney King-Dye, was injured last March and suffered a serious head injury, because she wasn’t wearing a helmet. Shocking. She was in a coma for about three weeks, and is now slightly recovered.

Courtney King-Dye and her late Olympic mount, Mythilus © 2008 by Nancy Jaffer
Here are excerpts from one news story:
Courtney often wears a helmet, but she was not in this instance. Lendon Gray, her mentor, said that for the last 15 years of her riding career, she wore a helmet and hoped she could encourage others to do the same, but helmets are rarely seen at a dressage show.
Another Grand Prix rider Heather Blitz has started a campaign that urges dressage riders to wear helmets, as she requires her students to do.
Citing the need for dressage riders to acknowledge the inherent risks of being on a horse, she said, “Courtney’s accident reminds us all how vulnerable we are around horses.
Recounting the accident, Lendon said of the horse, “We think one hind foot stepped on the other and he sort of semi sat down and tipped over sideways. Courtney was basically under him; she stayed in the tack and obviously her head hit the ground.”
Paramedics were on the scene quickly and Courtney, who had suffered a skull fracture, was taken by helicopter to the hospital. Read the rest of this entry »