This was going to be a column about fancy-pants horse dancing. You know, dressage.
Four years ago, the American horse Mopsie made the world lose its collective, Olympic-watching mind with his rave-dancing performance in Tokyo. Equestrian events started Friday in Paris, and dressage continues this week at the Palace of Versailles.
Then, some British woman beat the crap out of her horse with a whip. She was her country’s top horsewoman. Suddenly, there are fresh calls to abandon equestrian sports at the Olympics as out-of-date animal cruelty.
To help me make sense of this, I went to Maryland’s top elected horseman — Steuart Pittman.
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“Well, you know, I can understand that perspective,” the Anne Arundel County executive said. “It tends to come from people who haven’t participated and assume that the fact that the human being is directing the animal is what’s cruel. But that’s true of walking your dog.”
Maryland U.S. senators and state cabinet secretaries have been counted among high-level riders. Of the current top elected officials, though, Pittman is the only one who can talk about this from the perspective of both a competitive rider and professional trainer.
“The associations that oversee these sports, they know that the public is more and more sensitive to animal cruelty or abuse, and the rules get more and more strict about cracking down on anything that can even be perceived as abusive,” Pittman said. “And so that means that the competitors have to be very, very aware of their training techniques. ... They know they have to figure out ways to do it that are more humane and less coercive.”
Maryland is, and always has been, a place that loves horses. There are about 94,000 of them in the state, according to a 2023 report by the American Horse Council. The numbers appear to be growing, although the state stopped conducting its own equine census back in 2010.
“Racing has shrunk, but the rest of the horse industry has grown,” Pittman said. “And then what’s happened in agriculture, particularly in Anne Arundel County, is farms are converting from grain to equine.”
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All this means there are likely to be doubts in Maryland about equating horsemanship and animal cruelty.
Three-time British Olympic dressage champion Charlotte Dujardin was forced out of the Olympics after video surfaced of her repeatedly whipping a horse she was training. Judges in Paris have cautioned two other riders about their behavior.
“The message to the International Olympic Committee should be clear by now: Remove equestrian events from the Olympic Games,” PETA said in a post on X.
Pittman started riding at age 8 or 9 when his parents bought him a pony. He joined the St. Margaret’s Pony Club in Annapolis and eventually became a top-level competitor and sought-after trainer.
“I would take horses myself and compete them, sometimes horses that I had bred, sometimes horses that I had purchased off the racetrack and was planning to sell,” he said. “I would compete them to give them a résumé, which would make them more valuable.”
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He also founded the Retired Racehorse Project, which works to find new homes for thoroughbreds after their racing days are over. All this gives Pittman an understanding of competitive spirit, both in animals and humans, and how training fits them together.
“When it’s in sport, it’s true that human beings become competitive, and that can lead to abuse,” Pittman said.
It is also true that horses love to run and jump.
“Horses, just like birds, like to fly. Horses like to run and jump,” Pittman said. “I mean, yeah, not every horse. You know, they also like to stand around and eat. But the ones that are the most, the ones that are good at this stuff, they love it or they wouldn’t do it.”
Understanding how horses think is the key to humanely training them for something like dressage, show jumping or even recreational riding. Horses in a herd use their teeth and hooves to show who’s boss, who leads and who follows.
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Humans, a fraction of the size of a horse, use different techniques to accomplish the same goals. Pittman uses a psychology-based method called natural horsemanship, essentially trying to “speak horse.”
“The way they do the round pen work with the trainers is you create some pressure and you push the horse away, and then you turn around, the horse follows you like a puppy dog,” Pittman said. “It’s a combination of setting boundaries and earning trust.”
How successfully a trainer accomplishes this is what you look for when watching equestrian events, like those at the Olympics.
In dressage, a horse is trained to move in harmony to music with their rider, who guides it using a series of small movements. Show jumpers leap across huge obstacles, which requires training in endurance, confidence and trust in the rider.
Pittman competed in three-day eventing, the triathlon of horseback riding. It combines the first two events with cross-country riding, which involves jumping over ditches, banks and water obstacles. Training adds the use of different muscle groups to the confidence and connection with the rider seen in the other events.
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“It’s the ultimate test where all three are combined, plus speed and bravery and a connection between the horse and rider that is really life and death for the rider in particular, but the horse sometimes as well,” Pittman said. “I think it’s the only sport in which the human being’s performance is the result of years of partnership between a human and an animal.”
When training fails, the result can be shocking. Obstacle races on foot will replace show jumping in the 2028 modern pentathlon competition, a response to video of a German coach punching one of his team’s horses during the 2020 games in Tokyo.
Equestrian events began in Paris on Friday, and the U.S. team has yet to win a medal. Pittman knows a few members of the team.
But he has barely been on a horse since being elected to office in 2018. He sold the horses he was training and rented out the barns on his family farm in Davidsonville.
There have, however, been times when politics and horses have combined.
Republican critics briefly attempted to label him as a “wealthy horseman” in his first term. It never worked, maybe because the county’s 4,500 horses are spread out across pony clubs, private stables, county equestrian centers and hundreds of little farms. They’re not all rich people.
“There are some who think of, you know, the rugged cowboy. This guy’s tough, or this guy is a hard worker because he’s out there in the dirt with the animals,” Pittman said. “And there are other people who think, ‘Oh, this guy goes prancing around in his tight pants and his boots and his little top hat or something. ...’ And then there’s everything in between.”
He’s used his position to prevent the county’s only grain elevator from closing, advocate for better conditions at Laurel Park and focus attention on redevelopment once its racing schedule ends. Maryland bought Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, and there’s only enough demand to support one thoroughbred track in the state today.
Then there was the commercial.
Gov. Wes Moore endorsed Pittman in his 2022 reelection bid. Pittman had to borrow horses for the shot, which featured both Democrats holding their animals by the reins. Neither ever mounted up.
Although the keyword was bleeped by the timely neigh of a horse, their 30-second campaign video included a line Pittman said he learned from his older brother that seems particularly apt for politics — followed by an image of his opponent.
“Knowing horsesh*t when you see it.”
