Dastardly Doings at the 1936 Olympic Cross Country Event

Courtesy of Lucinda Green who loaded this video onto her Facebook page and set me Googling. Cross-country at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and there appears to be a bit of a problem at fence four, The Pond.  I’ve found some images of the posters for the Olympics here, and here on Ponybox is the …

Riding Philosophically, Riding Culturally

Hello folks, I haven’t been such a great blogger lately because I’ve been working on The Next Big Thing – actually the Two Next Big Things. They’re books two and three, the first of which will be underway this spring, and the second needs whipping into shape so that it can be rolled out sometime …

Whole Heap of Little Horse Links

Thank you to Christina for this link about an Olympic three-day-event hopeful who survived a catastrophic barn fire. The NYT features includes a short film and a slideshow. Christina also sent this extraordinary story about a rescued horse. It’s not so much the rescue that stands out, as the practice it sheds light on. Apparently …

Fair Hill, Fair Henny: Cross Country Through a Horse’s Ears

Ever exhilarating: take a ride round the cross-country course at the Fair Hill International in Maryland with the wonderful Henny and Peter Atkins of Australia. Henny (whom I wrote about briefly here) loves cross country, as you can probably tell by his ears, which are pricked all the way round. Atkins says he once saw …

Salvos Across the Equine Gene Pool: a Reader

This is not so much a post as a string of links to some interesting, thought-provoking essays elsewhere and a question: what is “pure blood” and should it matter? Let me explain. Roughly speaking, until the nineteenth century and even the twentieth century, the vast majority of horses and ponies in the West were not …

Sidesaddle at the Olympics

I promise I’ll write about something other than sidesaddle soon, but I couldn’t resist these two snippets: 1) The brilliant Italian écuyère Elvira Guerra competed sidesaddle in the “hacks and hunters combined event” (photo of her here) at the 1900 Paris Olympics – a non-Olympic event, to be sure, but it wasn’t until 1952 that …

Henny!

Peter Atkins of the Australian team and his horse Henry Jota Hampton, or Henny, take us round the World Olympic Games 2010 cross-country course in Kentucky courtesy of a helmet cam. Just watch those ears! If you want to contribute to this partnership, or learn more about Henny, who was picked up by Atkins for …