Horsies

At my gym, in the cardio machine area, there are two rows of plasma televisions, back to back so whichever side you're on you can watch tv while running/walking/elliptically training/cycling/stairstepping, etc. Each machine has a little built in jack thing so you can plug in your headphones and listen to whichever tv you wish. The stations they are set to are pretty much always the same: on the far left they play music videos with scantily clad people to discourage you from getting off the treadmill early, then there is the nice commercial-free BBC news 24 (the only channel always featuring closed captioning, therefore the one I always watch), which is then following by Sky sports, then some random channel down at the other end showing soap operas and the Simpsons.

I will admit that on it's own that is not so intriguing. But let's go back to the third station, Sky Sports. A lot of the time it's sort of chat shows or the news, where they talk about 'football' quite a lot, rugby, tennis, cricket, and all that sort of boring English sports stuff. Yesterday, on the other hand, they were showing a World Cup for something I found quite strange: equestrian events. There I was, jogging at my relatively slow pace on no incline reading about whatever was on the news, and I glance over to the next tv to see a guy in a little chariot-type thing lead by four white horses weaving around a track in an indoor arena as if their tails were on fire. Me: 'WHAAAAAAA???'. So now it had my attention. That guy finished and was very pleased. A minute later another 'team' got to go, as this time I noticed that aside from the one holding the reigns, there were two guys behind him running back and forth to give their weight to one side to make it easier to turn. They were all tanned and looked like they could have been named Tad. They were not as pleased with their scores. In case you are having trouble envisioning this, I have gone to the trouble of locating the website, which can be found here.

So that was the end of carriage racing and the Tad's disappeared to be replaced by a few jumpers, which was all well and good because that's what I would expect to see at such an event. Then more craziness ensued. There was the horse and the rider, the rider sitting completely still obviously relaying telepathic messages to the horse, which was, I don't the actual word for it, but prancing sideways in a very coordinated fashion. The horse only had two feet on the ground at any one time, so front right/back left, then front left/back right. Like it was hopping from one to the other, slowly going sideways. This was apparently exactly what it was supposed to be doing as when they were done the rider looked very pleased. I couldn't help but wonder how you even begin to teach a horse how to do this, or really why you would go to the trouble. Then someone else was given a trophy while on a horse. I wasn't really sure what was going on, but I decided it was more bizarre without sound. I'm not sure if Zara Phillips was participating in any of the events, but let's just say she was.

I'm not quite sure where exactly equestrian events such as these fall in the sports spectrum, but the fact that they're being shown on Sky sports at 6pm is still something of a statement. It seems like one of those things where you really need to know what's going on to get the full effect. I think in that respect I shall liken it to the winter Olympics, like watching skiing and the bobsled, where you pretend you know what's going on but are really just waiting for someone to crash.