WELLINGTON, Fla.—The speakers boomed with the familiar lyrics of Journey, and the crowd roared in jubilation: “Don’t stop believing…hold on to that feeling!”
The audience of about 1,400 wasn’t cheering a band, but an exquisitely polished black gelding named Danilo as he pranced across the arena, carrying a rider wearing white breeches and tails under stadium lights. The performance, set to a medley of a cappella harmonies that resembled a routine on the television series ‘Glee,’ won the loudest cheers from the crowd, but not the stony-faced judges. Technical errors, virtually invisible to the untrained eye, placed the team fourth.
“I took a risk with that music,” said Danilo’s rider, Shelly Francis, shrugging off the persnickety judges. “Now people think it’s wicked cool.”
Dressage, the equestrian event commonly described as ‘horse ballet,’ is tap dancing as fast as it can to stay relevant. These days, renegade riders are asking horses used to trotting to Tchaikovsky to body-pop to Beyoncé in an event set to music known as the freestyle.
Dressage’s new soundtrack, often harmonized arrangements of classics from Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ to Bon Jovi’s ‘It’s My Life,’ is hardly cutting edge. But the arrival of more popular music, sometimes with lyrics, is dividing a sport famed for conformity into two stables—conservatives and crowd pleasers.
The rift comes amid changes to the Olympic format for next year’s Tokyo games meant to make dressage more appealing to a wider audience.
“We can’t lose sight of the basic sport,” says Anne Gribbons, a top international dressage judge who has scored four World Cup finals. “The freestyle is the icing on the cake, and it should remain that way. I don’t want it to be the only thing that we see.”
Often viewed as elitist—a fact that isn’t helped by the top hats and tails many riders wear in competition—dressage can trace its roots to ancient Greece, where horse and rider trained to quickly move from side to side and change direction or speed to survive on the battlefield.
It made its Olympic debut in 1912 and evolved in the 20th century into a kind of silent, technical dance.
Common sports fans didn’t necessarily appreciate features like the canter pirouette, a notoriously complex move in which the horse’s front legs move in a circle around the hind legs in a bouncy pivot that should take no fewer than 6 and no more than 8 steps to complete.
Dressage had been rumored to be on the Olympic chopping block in times past, though the International Olympic Committee has already confirmed the event for the 2024 games.
“The sport over many years found itself a bit in trouble,” says Robert Dover, who represented the U.S. in dressage at every summer Olympics from 1984 to 2004, taking home four medals. “People said, ‘It’s sort of like watching paint dry.’”
So the dressage governing body decided to add an event set to music. Other sports have made similar moves to boost ratings. For instance, in late 2014, new rules allowed figure skaters to use music with vocals, opening the way for Jimmy Ma’s viral hip-hop-electronic dance mix at the 2018 U.S. championships.
Dressage’s transformation was more discreet. The Grand Prix freestyle, which allows riders the autonomy to choreograph their own routines to a piece of music, was introduced in the 1980s and made its debut at the Olympics in 1996. Back then, the music was almost exclusively classical.
“They thought it would sort of save the day for dressage, and it actually did,” Mr. Dover said.
The event has become so popular with audiences and advertisers that since the London Olympics in 2012, the freestyle alone determines the individual medals. And for the first time at next year’s Tokyo Olympics, a second of the three Olympic dressage events will include music: the Grand Prix Special, which helps determine the team medals.
All combinations will ride the same routine, or test, but riders will select their own accompanying music, which won’t be judged, but make the event more entertaining for viewers.
“Now there’s this element of who picks the best music. But honestly, I’m up for trying anything,” says Laura Graves, the winner of the popular Friday Night Lights event in Wellington where Ms. Francis placed fourth. “If we sell tickets and get new fans, there isn’t a lot I wouldn’t do.”
At the vanguard of the dressage disruption is U.S. rider Steffen Peters, a two-time Olympic medalist, who has made a name for himself with freestyles that win the crowd even if they don’t win him the gold. At the Rio Olympics, Mr. Peters and his horse Legolas 92 performed a freestyle that began with a jaunty voice-over: “Hey, I’m Legolas. Let’s go!” Then the duo hoofed it into Vanilla Ice’s 1990 hit ‘Ice, Ice Baby,’ while Legolas trotted in place—a movement known as a piaffe—to the beat of the music.
“Dressage is such a conservative sport: With a sense of humor you can lighten it up,” Mr. Peters said on a phone call while driving through the desert on his way to Las Vegas. After a competition, “I like to hit the desert with my ATV and go a little a crazy,” he said.
Popular celebrity gossip blog Dlisted named Legolas the ‘Hot Slut of the Day’ on August 16, 2016, after his Olympic performance. The judges were less impressed. “This world isn’t a fair or right place, so Steffen and Legolas placed 12th,” celebrity blogger Michael K wrote in the post.
“Oh that’s hysterical,” Mr. Peters said. “The problem was, on that particular day, I went first. At the end of the day, it’s up to the judges’ sense of humor, and it might not be there too early in the morning.”
In Wellington these days, crowds pack the stands for the Friday Night Lights events that feature some of the world’s top-dressage riders, dancing to their own tunes.
“I like it, I come with my wife,” said Joe Gaipo, 59, from Palm City, Fla., about a 50-minute drive from Wellington. “I don’t like the fuddy-duddy stuff. If I rode, I’d like to ride to Aerosmith.”
