Horse show challenges both riders and mounts

Chloe Reid is listing the foods her pony, Blue on Blue, likes best.

“He likes to eat crushed-up hay,” the bagged, dustless variety known as denghi, says 10-year-old Chloe. “He also likes apples and carrots and peppermints. I had another pony who liked to eat M&Ms.;”

It’s not just her animals’ quirky snack preferences that Chloe, who lives with her family in Georgetown, knows well. She also knows how to wield a curry comb (a tool for grooming horses’ coats), when to urge a pony to pick up its pace, and why a horse might need to be draped with a blanket.

Such is the life of a young rider with a consuming passion for horses and a serious yen to compete.

And compete she will — in the “small pony hunter” class — when she and Blue on Blue join some 600 horses and almost 500 riders for the 48th annual Washington International Horse Show (WIHS), opening Tuesday at the Verizon Center.

The last of a kind

It’s a five-day showcase for some of the world’s best-known horses and riders, who vie for honors in the performance arts of jumping, side-saddle riding and dressage (the highly disciplined display of precise movement sometimes called “ballet on horseback.”)

Interspersed among the intense demonstrations of horsemanship are a few changes of pace that also serve to broaden the audience for what has always been considered a blue-blooded sport: Jack Russell terrier races, guaranteed to elicit smiles; barrel racing, a rodeo-style Western-saddle event; a “barn night” that encourages people associated with area barns and stables to dress up to show their barn spirit; and a “celebrity challenge” that pairs a show jumper on horseback with a local media personality in a golf cart and puts them on an obstacle course.

Rounding out the bill are an indoor polo exhibition and a pony pavilion on the afternoon of Oct. 28 that gives children the chance to meet and handle the small horses.

The WIHS is the last major invitational indoor horse show in the United States to include both hunter events — judged primarily on the smoothness, flow and carriage of horse and rider — and jumper events, which put a premium on the athletic prowess of the horse and its rider’s ability to guide the animal over technically demanding courses. The Syracuse Invitational Sporthorse Tournament, also an indoor event, excludes hunters — and the tony National Horse Show, which left Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden in 2001 after more than a century there, continues this year in Wellington, Fla., as an outdoor show.

Glamour with conditions

It’s a trial on several levels, certainly for the competitors.

“Washington is the most glamorous horse show, but it is also probably the hardest to prepare for,” says Betty Oare of Warrenton, Va., who with her husband, Ernest, owns EMO Stables and shows at least a dozen champion thoroughbreds.

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