Here is an article from 2002. I believe it is more prevelent than most people want to believe.
I Was The Skinniest Girl In The Barn - Jane, October, 2002
Shelly is horse crazy. She started riding when she was 5. In fourth grade, she had a growth spurt. Suddenly she reached 5 feet, but the rest of her body couldn’t seem to keep up, and her weight stayed at 74 pounds. “I was horrified,” she says now. “I looked like a skeleton.” But the people in her riding classes thought she looked great, the perfect petite rider.
So when the Texas native grew three more inches over the next year, she freaked out that she might gain a few pounds. She decided to starve herself. By the time she was 12, she had to drop out of some of her horse shows. " I was 71 pounds," she says. " I couldn’t get our of bed because I was too weak. I ended up having to go to the hospital. My vitamin levels were down, my anitbodies were nonexistent, and my liver and kidnerys were failing." The next year, she had to get a kidney transplant from her sister because hers were so damaged. She’ll be on rejection medications for the rest of her life.
Shelly puts much of the blame on the “thinner is better” culture of the horse-show world. “Anorexia isn’t a life I chose because I wanted it,” she says. “But it was the only way to keep up with the corrupted mind of our judges, who told us whtether we were good.”
According to various doctors and psychotherapists who specialize in equestrians, the incidence of anorexia, bulimia and binge eating within that group has risen noticeably over the past 10 years (unfortunately, no one has bothered to officially track this). But unlike in ballet and gymnastics, there are no programs in place to try to prevent eating disorders in its ranks. Apparently, these problems are not supposed to exist in a sophisticated world of big bucks and sleek animals. And if they do, they’re not supposed to be openly discussed. Here’s how the nightmare begins - and it sure isn’t from something the girls ate.
“They don’t say flat-out that you have a big butt”
Lynne Evans suffered from anorexia when she was 10, but she had pretty much recovered by the time she turned 16. Part of the reason she chose to go into horseback riding was because she thought it wasn’t abuot looking like a Barbie doll. SHe had just managed to get up to a healthy weight, and she thought this would be one sport that wouldn’t drag her back into the illness.
Then she started carefully listening to her trainers. “They kept telling me, ‘The horse and rider need to be light. You need to have a light step and help the horse with that’,” she says. Her size complex started to return. “I was young and I thought, 'What does that mean? Are you saying I’m really, really big and I’m weighing down my horse?Oh God. I can’t eat anything.”
The one day, when Lynne was out in the field with the other students, she overheard one of the girls laugh and say, "Which is the horse’s rear and which is Lynne’s? At 17, Lynne started throwing up her meals.
She points out that the messages to lose weight are often subtle. “None of the trainers say flat-out that you have a big butt,” she explains. “But then the thinners girls get the compliments and praise, even if you really have the same ability. It’s not enough to be fit - you have to be below normal weight to fit the physical ideal.”
In equitation, or horsemanship, only the rider is judged, not the horse. Part of this means looking elegant in breeches, riding coat, boots and jaunty hat. There are no weight limits in the rules for equitation determined by USA Equestrian, Inc. (formerly the American Hourse Shows Association) - only the proportion between horse and rider is supposed to matter. However, looking elegant often seems to mean looking thin: The getup is not only expensive, about $350 to buy a new set of jacket, boots and chaps, but also tight.
“I couldn’t face going into the arena,” Lynne says, explaining how the emphasis on weight casued her to drop out of the competitive scene. “The people are there to cheer you on, but at the same time they’re there eyeballing you in the outfit that you hvae to wear. I’d gained a little weight, and I started to feel really bad about myself.”
Karry Davis, 22, is nine months pregnant when I speak to her. She’s been riding in horse shows for 12 years and has battled with anorexia for eight, but she recently vowed to stay healthy for the baby. “The main reason I want to have the baby right now is so I can start losing weight again,” she admits. "I want to go to a horse show in a month and a half, and I’m looking at my riding clothes thinking, “I’ve got to fit into these.’ I don’t want to do anything to hurt myself or anything, but it’s like, ‘How am I going to lose all this weight?’”
“They’re judging a beauty contest instead of a horse show.”
A year and a half ago, Denna Johnson, a trainer, started a thread on the Web site for The Chronicle of the Horse, a well-respected magazine. Called “The Weight Issue,” the thread attracted more than 300 posters and revealed a problem that shocked those who took the time to read it.
On the thread, Denna described a college horse show she and her student went to. One of her novice riders competed against a more experienced student and came close to beating her. The girl asked Denna what she did wrong. Denna told her that she’d kicked ass, and that with a little more mileage she’d be golden. Happy, the girl then went over to one of the judges to ask what she should work on. The judge answered, “You have nice equitation, but you’ll never win seriously unless you lose five pounds.” Denna couldn’t believe it. “The girl was hysterical and told me, ‘I’m fat and ugly, and I can’t ride,’” Denna recalls. The student was 5-foot-10 and 130 pounds. Denna was livid.
Longtime rider Vikki Siegel knows all about what goes on in some judges’ minds. She has two daughters who also ride. One is considered to have the perfect rider body type - slender with long legs. She started noticing that at the shows, her shorter, stockier daughter had to work a lot harder to get the same points: “She had to be twice as good as anybody with long legs. And my thinner, younger daughter - they just forgave her major faults.”
She adds, “I run a lot of horse shows, so I talk to a lot of judges. And there is no doubt that right now instead of judging a horse show, we are judging a beauty contest.”
“Trainers don’t consider this big enough to address.”
"Most barns like mine, where every single one of the kids idolizes the trainer, " says 20 year old Eleanor of Maryland. “If the trainers were willing to talk openly about eating disorders, it would do amazing things for the students.” Eleanor dropped 20 pounds one summer to try to look like one of her friends blessed with “the look.” These days, she keeps a sharp eye on the younger kids in her barn. “I feel like it’s part of my job to make sure they don’t mess up like I did,” she says. “But not too many trainers seem to consider this enough of a problem to address.”
Some instructors, like Denna, do go out of their way to not say things that could make the teenagers associate successfulness with being a certain size. Other trainers don’t seem to realize the effect their words can have.
George Morris is a world-class coach who has trained several Olympic equestrians. He’s won numberous equitation championships, and he’s pretty much thought of as the shit in the show-jumping world. And he’s also known for being shockingly open with riders about how he feels about weight. One of his mottoes is, “The best exercise a rider can get is to push away from the dinner table.”
He’s only too happy to elaborate. “You see these overfe, over-self-indulged girls and ladies,” he says, enunciating each word. “Their riding coats are tight and bulging a little through the seams. They are galloping around on top of the saddle. It makes them top-heavy, like a cork on top of a wave. They hate me, they don’t want to hear the truth.”
George, a former judge, says he would “absolutely” take points from the heavier rider if two people were equally skilled in a competition. But he doesn’t think this leads to many eating disorders. “That’s called going to extremes,” he says. “But I don’t know that I’ve had any anorexics over the 30 or 40 years that I’ve had a barn. People say, ‘Oh, this one was anorexic and that one was.’ I didn’t see it. I didn’t know it. I don’t think I created it.”
Later George tells me, "I hope you don’t water down my quotes like you people do, soften it up and whitewash it. It’ll sell magazines like crazy to have a scathing article. Send it to me, now, with the pages burning.
“The richer girls were envious because I was the skinniest.”
When now 35-year-old Claire was on the junior hunter and equitation circuits in highschool, her mother strongly encouraged her to beat one of the wealthier neighborhood girls in the shows. Claire felt that one way she could increase her odds against the student, who had a way more expensive horse, was by being way thinner than her. So she started to take a lot of diuretics.
“For a while, I was the skinniest girl in the barn,” says still-ultra-thin Claire, almost proudly. “The richer girls were envious.” She would spend winters showing in Palm Beach,Fla., with the other students and a tutor, away from their parents in New Jersey and from anyone who watched what they ate. Or even whether they ate. “So many of us had eating disorders,” she says. "Part of it was that our parents had spent so much money on the horses and training. We felt we had to do well at all the shows to make it worth it.
The thing is, these women might already be predisposed toward eating disorders. “It’s not that the horse-show world breeds eating disorders,” says Kristen Humann, as equestrian and psychotherapist in Washington,D.C. “It’s more of an economic issure. It takes more money to deal with horses than other sports. And anorexia and bulimia are predominantly upper-class diseases. They’re looking perfect on the outside and in a lot of pain on the inside.”
The environment, it seems, only adds fuel to the fire. Claire and her friends’ days in Florida were filled with competitive riding; their nights with puking, diet pills and endless diuretics. When socializing, they would compare the merits of various vomiting tips, whether it was easier to puke after eating chinese food or drinking diet soda. Palm Beach had turned into Lord of the Flies, debutante-style. “We were pretty much out of control,” Claire recalls," and our parents were hundreds of miles away, so they had no idea."
“One day there is going to be a serious accident.”
Maybe it doesn’t need to be said, but trotting around on a 1,000 plus-pound creature isn’t too safe ir you’re woozy from lack of nutrients. One day during class, after taking many diuretics and then roasting in the heat, Claire passed out. The instructors ran to help her. “I’m fine,” she insisted. They didn’t ask her many questions, and after a few minutes she got back on her horse and continued the class.
Even George Morris says that underweight riders can be injured, or killed, by a horse. As Vikki explains, “It takes a lot of strength and muscle to be able to hold a horse, and riders won’t be able to do that it they’re too weak. One day there is going to be a serious accident because of this.”
Elizabeth, a 16-year-old rider from MIchigan is 5-foot-4 and weighs 118 pounds. Last year, one of her friends who competes in bigger shows slipped into anorexia. “I saw that when she lost weight, she started doing better,” says Elizabeth. “So I thought if I got skinnier, I would do better too.” She fasted and dropped 10 pounds. “But I started to feel weak on my horse, and I would lose my concentration,” she says. She was scared she ws going to be thrown off the horse. “That’s when I knew I had to stop.” Fortunately, she’s now back to her normal weight. Elizabeth begged me not to use even her real first name, because her mother doesn’t know any of this.
“Do you think any of us want to acknowledge this?”
One rider with a prominent job in the industry said he didn’t think eating disorders were a big problem among equestrians. Then a few minutes laterm he mentioned that one of his riding friends had died from anorexia: “She was riding with this emaciated appearance. We were all worried, trying to get her to do something about it, because it affected her strength, and her bones were brittle. She ended up suffering a fall, and didn’t make it.” But then he refused to give more details, and asked me not to indentify her.
One person’s name keeps coming up again and again among men, women, trainers, judges and ever people in the equestrian federation. They whisper things like, “She looks like a Nazi victim,” and, “This child is probably going to die before anybody will do anyting to help her.” But no one will go on the record talking about this successful rider’s possible disorder. They don’t want to make waves in their close-knit community, or insult her with their concern.
When I get her on the phone, she lightly tells me, “I was very fortunate in being blessed with a naturally thin figure. I’ve never really had to work with staying thin.” She denies having an eating disorder and says she’s never felt pressured to be skinny: “Nobody has ever told me to lose weight. My problem has more been being strong enough and heavy enough. I think eating disorders might be a problem with the younger riders, but not with the others.”
Okay then, whether it’s a problem for younger riders or older ones, many afree that it’s not being dealth with in the open, which is perhaps the scariest thing. I ask Alan Balch, the director of USA Equestrian whether that will ever change. “Maybe we need to have our equitation committee take up this question a little more formally,” he says, sounding sincere. “If these are things that are out there, maybe we should have some official campaigns.”
Shelly, who’s walking around with her sister’s kidney, hears denials of eating disorders all the time among horseback riders. “Do you think any of us want to acknowledge that this life wreaks havoc on us?” she asked. “This all began with someone’s standards about weight and then we followed. But nobody has woke up yet and said, ‘This needs to stop.’”
