[QUOTE=Darkwave;7434702]
Building on Chunky munky’s point: In the 80s and 90s, I trained with someone who had been showing since the 1950s. Her father drove a taxi, and yet she had multiple ponies to show, and won ribbons at Madison Square Garden. Many of her friends from that time came from similar backgrounds. It was not unusual for families of working class backgrounds to have a horse or pony in the backyard.
When I was growing up in the DC area in the mid 80s to early 90s, the income point had shifted some. You would not see kids whose parents drove taxis at the horse shows. But local riding schools were still fairly common, and I knew kids whose parents were school teachers and such who showed locally. At the A shows, most of us were pretty well off - our parents were doctors, lawyers, restauranteurs, etc. But we weren’t trust fund kids.
Looking at it today, the income point has shifted more - my perception (please feel free to correct) is that the kids showing at the A’s are now the kids of successful hedge fund managers, CEOs, and trust fund families, or doctors and lawyers who have knocked it out of the park (founders of treatment centers, partners at major law firms). And you don’t see that many local riding schools for kids to start at. And you see very few kids with a pony in the back yard.
That’s why I say that I’m concerned the bottom will fall out. Where do the new kids come from? There’s not the same ground level of riding schools and ponies in back yards. And there’s only so many hedge fund managers and trust funds.
On a related note, I think the EAP program and stuff like it is fantastic. But I’m worried that as the sport gets more and more concentrated in the ranks of the financial super-elite, there will be less opportunities for kids from other backgrounds to even give the sport a try. What if there were no local riding schools, and Jacob Pope had never had a chance to get on a horse, and decided he liked swimming instead?[/QUOTE]
I am a lurker on this forum but I have to comment on this post which I think is very insightful. Darkwave talks about the pony in the backyard, and to take that idea one step further, how many people have back yards? Urban areas and planned suburban developments are becoming denser. Fewer people live in rural areas where horses are allowed, compared to thirty and forty years ago. This is not a bad thing; there are more and more really attractive and functional places to live and middle-class houses are bigger and nicer than they were decades ago; but this change in living styles and evolving demographics is really affecting the future of horse ownership and the future of horse sports. Like Darkwave asks, where do the new kids come from?
