07/16/2026
The Cars Aren't Yours: On Being a Professional Rider
If you want to understand what it's like to be a professional dressage rider, forget the horse world for a second and think about Formula 1.
The driver doesn't own the car. The team does. The driver is extraordinarily good at their job, better than almost anyone alive, and yet the car can be taken away from them at any point, for reasons that have nothing to do with their skill. Someone else falls into favor. The team needs to sell. The sponsor's priorities shift. Sometimes the owner never even wanted to be in racing in the first place, they inherited the team and would honestly rather be doing something else with the money.
Swap "car" for "horse" and you've got professional dressage in a sentence.
💛 Grateful, and still honest about it
Before I get into the hard part, I want to be clear about the other part: I am genuinely grateful to be a professional rider. Grateful to the owners who have trusted me with horses I could never have afforded to buy myself. Grateful for the experiences, the competitions, the travel, the sheer quality of animal I've gotten to sit on because someone else believed it was worth backing me to do it.
It's a lifestyle we choose, and one we choose because we love it. Nobody gets into this for the job security. You get into it because being paid to ride and manage horses, professionally, is the closest thing to the dream most of us had as kids on ponies.
But it is a hard sport. Especially if you don’t have your own property. Especially if you don't have your own horses. Especially if your whole professional existence is banking on literally being paid to do this, because that's a different deal than the one a hobbyist signs.
💛 The deal you sign without signing anything.
Most professional riders don't own the horses that define their careers. They can't. A horse capable of taking you to Grand Prix, of getting you noticed, of getting you on a plane to compete somewhere that actually matters, that horse is usually well beyond what a working rider could ever afford on their own. So you ride other people's horses. You take the opportunities that come with that: the quality of animal, the access, the travel, the events you'd otherwise only watch from the ground.
And in exchange, you accept a condition nobody says out loud but every professional understands: none of it is yours. Not really. Not in any way that's guaranteed to last.
💛 When the car gets sold.
Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. When it ends, and for most riders, at some point, with some horse, it does, it doesn't end because you did anything wrong. It ends because an owner's circumstances changed. Because they found someone else they'd rather back. Because the horse needs to be sold and the sale doesn't include you. Because the family member who inherited the barn was never actually that into dressage to begin with.
You can be riding brilliantly. You can be doing everything right. And you can still lose the ride.
For a hobbyist, someone who owns their own horse, funds their own program, answers to no one but themselves, this simply isn't a risk they carry. They have control. They decide what happens to their horse, their trajectory, their season. A professional doesn't have that luxury. The very thing that makes the job possible, riding horses you could never afford, is the same thing that makes it precarious. You don't get the opportunity without also accepting that it can be withdrawn.
💛 What it actually does to you.
This is the part that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it. It's not just a professional setback. It reaches into how you see your own value.
You build a picture of where you're headed, a horse, a season, a goal you've been working towards for months or years and then, sometimes overnight, that picture is gone. Not because you failed. Because the ground you were standing on was never yours to stand on in the first place.
And it takes time to come back from that. Not just logistically, finding another ride, another opportunity but internally. Relearning that your worth as a rider was never actually tied to that one horse. Rebuilding the belief that you can get back to where you were, even though the last time you tried to build something, it was taken out from under you without warning.
💛 Staying in it anyway
I say all of this from experience, not theory. And I don't say it to be bitter about the sport I say it because I think professional riders deserve to have this named clearly, rather than quietly absorbed as just "part of the job."
It is part of the job. But it shouldn't be a silent one. If you're a professional and you've felt this, the rug-pull, the sudden absence of a plan you were sure of, you're not imagining the size of it, and you're not weak for finding it hard to shake off. It's a real loss, even if no one else around you treats it that way.
You put yourself back together. You find the next horse, the next opportunity, the next version of the plan. But it's worth being honest about what it costs to do that, and why professional riders, more than most, need to hold onto a sense of their own value that isn't dependent on who currently owns the horse or car.
We accept this lifestyle, and most of us would choose it again.
