Whatever Happened to Horse Sport on the Telly?

Horse sports in the 1970s and 1980s were prime time viewing for all the family - what changed?

When British riders can do brilliantly on the world stage and barely get a mention on mainstream sports news, is it just about television budgets? Or has horse sport got a much bigger problem?

This article actually started with a Facebook post from an eventing friend. He was disappointed that, after our British eventers had done so brilliantly at the World Championships in Aachen, their achievements didn't appear to warrant even a few seconds on the BBC sports news.

It got me thinking, not necessarily why wasn't the whole thing on the BBC, because perhaps expecting hours of eventing on terrestrial television in 2026 isn't particularly realistic. But surely a major British sporting achievement is still news? We are constantly told how successful Britain is as an equestrian nation. Our riders regularly win Olympic, World and European medals and these are people representing their country at the very highest level of international sport. So when did that stop being interesting to anybody outside the horse world?

I am old enough to remember a time when you could just stumble across horse sport on television. Badminton, Burghley, Hickstead, Olympia - you didn't necessarily have to go looking for it or even be particularly horsey to find it. Today it feels very different.

Actually, in some ways those of us who really want to watch horses have probably never had it so good. Specialist streaming means we can watch competitions all over the world which would never have made it onto terrestrial television years ago. If I want to watch horses, I can find horses, but that's rather the point. I already want to watch them.

What about everybody else?

At the same time as Aachen, Birmingham was hosting the European Athletics Championships, a major sporting event on home soil with British medal hopes and plenty of mainstream interest. Of course that was going to attract a lot of coverage and there are only so many hours of television and sports news to fill.

But it made me wonder whether this is really just about airtime, because perhaps quite a few things have happened at the same time. Broadcasters have less money, sport has moved towards subscriptions and streaming, horse sport has some increasingly uncomfortable welfare questions hanging over it and, at the very top, parts of equestrian sport can look unbelievably wealthy and pretty inaccessible to the rest of the world.

Maybe the surprising thing isn't that the BBC didn't show more eventing. Maybe the more interesting question is why we still expect mainstream broadcasters to care about horse sport at all.

The BBC isn't the BBC of ten years ago

I think sometimes we horse people imagine there is a huge BBC sports budget somewhere and somebody simply decides whether eventing deserves a bit of it. Obviously it isn't quite that simple.

The BBC has been under financial pressure for years. The amount of money it has available for its core services has fallen considerably in real terms, while sports rights have become incredibly expensive. The competition for those rights has completely changed too, with broadcasters now competing with streaming platforms, subscription channels and enormous global media companies.

If you've got limited money and you're deciding what to spend it on, then football, Wimbledon, athletics and other sports capable of pulling in huge audiences are obviously going to be hard for eventing or dressage to compete with. So perhaps some of this is simply economics, although I don't think that explains all of it.

Do people actually want to watch horses anymore?

This is where it gets slightly uncomfortable. World Horse Welfare has been asking the British public what they think about horses being used in sport and the figures aren't exactly reassuring.

In its 2025 YouGov polling, 22% of people said they did not support horses being used in sport at all, while another 42% said they would support horse sport only if welfare improved. That means quite a lot of ordinary people have some reservations about what we do with horses for sport, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

You can read their findings here

Dressage has had some awful welfare headlines in recent years and eventing inevitably attracts attention when a horse is badly injured or killed. Then there is racing, with its own increasingly difficult questions around horses racing very young, the whip, breeding, what happens to horses that don't make it and where they eventually end up.

We horse people might look at racing, dressage, showjumping and eventing as completely separate worlds, but I'm not sure somebody who isn't horsey does. They probably just see horses being used for sport.

Do non-horsey people lump all horse sports together in their minds? Image: Mounir El Barji

Social media has changed this too. One horrible video can go around the world in a few hours and people who have never been near a competition yard or an eventing stable see it and make a judgement about horse sport. Sometimes perhaps unfairly, sometimes perhaps not, but either way it affects how people see us.

Then there is the money problem

This is another slightly awkward one because equestrian sport looks incredibly rich, especially showjumping.

The prize money can be enormous, the venues are glamorous, horses sell for extraordinary amounts of money and some of the people competing at the top have very famous surnames. Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce Springsteen, has competed at Olympic level. Jennifer Gates, daughter of Bill Gates, competed at a very high level, while Eve Jobs, daughter of Steve Jobs, has also competed internationally.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. They are serious riders and clearly talented ones, but imagine looking at showjumping when you know absolutely nothing about horses. What does it look like? Does it look like a sport you could ever possibly be part of? Probably not, and perhaps that matters more than we think.

But isn't all top sport expensive?

This is the argument we often make in the horse world and it is true. Nobody gets to the top of professional sport for nothing.

Top cyclists ride incredibly expensive bikes, motorsport makes keeping horses look positively cheap, tennis players need years of coaching and international travel and professional athletes have coaches, physios, nutritionists and all sorts of other support. Elite sport costs money.

But I do think horse sport has one fairly obvious difference. You need a horse before you've even really started.

You can kick a football around in a park, go running, swim at your local pool or buy a skateboard. You cannot realistically find out whether you might be the next great event rider without somehow getting access to a horse.

Then, if you do want to compete seriously, the costs just keep coming. The horse, probably eventually more than one horse, livery or land, a lorry or trailer, fuel, farriers, vets, training, entry fees, saddles and equipment. Then there is the time involved as well, huge amounts of it.

British Equestrian itself has identified affordability as one of the barriers to people taking part in equestrian activity, so when somebody says equestrian sport is elitist, I'm not sure constantly replying "but anyone can ride" really answers the question. Yes, technically lots of people can learn to ride, but how many can afford to take it much further? That's slightly different.

British Equestrian — Horses For All report and response (PDF)

And what about the Olympics?

Every few years there seems to be another nervous conversation about whether equestrian sport has a long-term future in the Olympics and horse people immediately come out fighting. Of course it belongs in the Olympics. Look at the skill involved, the history and the incredible partnership between horse and rider.

I agree with all of that, but perhaps we are asking the wrong people. Instead of asking horse people why equestrian sport belongs in the Olympics, maybe we should ask somebody who has never touched a horse: why would you care if it disappeared?

That's a much harder question because loads of Olympic sports aren't things most of us actually do. Millions of us watch the 100 metres every four years despite never having joined an athletics club. We watch diving without ever climbing onto a ten-metre board and gymnastics while being completely incapable of doing a cartwheel.

Skateboarding is now an Olympic sport and at least with a skateboard a child can see it on television, get hold of a board and have a go. You can't exactly pop a five-star event horse under the Christmas tree.

Perhaps accessibility does matter then, not because everyone watching needs to have a realistic route to Olympic level, but because people need to feel some sort of connection with a sport if they are going to care about it.

Or perhaps television itself has changed

Then I come back to the other side of this. Maybe horse sport hasn't disappeared at all. Maybe television has.

Specialist streaming has actually been fantastic for horse sport in many ways. I can watch competitions from around the world which I would never have seen twenty years ago, watch an entire cross-country day instead of an hour of highlights and follow riders and competitions that would have had absolutely no chance of getting onto BBC television.

For people like me who already want to watch horse sport, that is brilliant, and perhaps without subscription streaming some of these sports would hardly be shown anywhere.

But there is a catch. How does anybody new find us?

Years ago you might turn the television on and Badminton happened to be there. You didn't have to go looking for horse sport because quite often it came to you.

I remember being completely enthralled watching the showjumping from Olympia and Hickstead on prime-time television with my grandparents. We would watch Olympia night after night and it felt like proper mainstream entertainment, not some niche sport tucked away somewhere that you had to subscribe to. I was horse-mad anyway, of course, but plenty of people watching probably weren't.

Household names David Broome and Harvey Smith providing the entertainment. Image: Credit unknown.

And that is perhaps what we have lost. Someone could sit down to watch with a horsey member of the family, or just happen across Badminton on a Sunday afternoon, watch a few riders and then another few and find themselves still there an hour later. Maybe some child somewhere saw it and thought, I want to do that. I know I did. I wanted to be the next Caroline Bradley or Liz Edgar.

But there was something else about televised horse sport then which I think we sometimes forget. It was fun to watch.

I remember being completely enthralled watching the showjumping from Olympia and Hickstead on prime-time television with my grandparents. It wasn't only about who won the Grand Prix either. There was entertainment built around it and riders became personalities that even people outside the horse world could recognise. Who can forget John Whitaker and Geoff Billington in the Christmas fancy dress classes at Olympia? It was funny, chaotic at times and, most importantly, entertaining television.

Who could forget the likes of John Whitaker doing his famous Madonna impersonation. Image: Credit unknown

I wonder if we have lost a bit of that as well. Modern top-level showjumping is an incredible sport and the standard of riding and horses is probably higher than it has ever been, but I'm not sure how exciting some of it is to somebody who doesn't understand what they are watching. To a horse person, a beautifully ridden clear round over a light, technical course can be fascinating. To somebody who knows nothing about horses, watching clear round after clear round may not hold quite the same appeal.

Perhaps horse sport used to understand that television needed a bit of theatre as well as competition. Hickstead and Olympia had atmosphere, characters, entertainment and classes people looked forward to watching. You didn't necessarily need to understand distances, time allowed or why a particular line was difficult to enjoy it.

That doesn't really happen if the sport is sitting behind a specialist subscription service that you only know exists because you're already interested in horses. And perhaps specialist coverage doesn't need to entertain the casual viewer in quite the same way, because everybody watching has already made the decision that they want to see horses.

So streaming may be doing two completely opposite things at once. It is saving niche horse sport for those of us who already love it, and giving us access to more competitions than we could ever have watched years ago, while at the same time possibly making it invisible to everyone else.

And perhaps that's the real loss. Not that we can't watch horse sport anymore, but that everyone else no longer happens to watch it with us.

So whose fault is it?

I'm not actually sure it is anybody's and I certainly don't think we can just blame the BBC. The BBC has less money, sports broadcasting has completely changed and equestrian coverage has moved towards specialist streaming. At the same time horse sport has some genuine welfare questions to answer, it has an accessibility problem and parts of it, particularly at the very top, increasingly give the impression of extraordinary wealth.

Which is slightly ironic when most horse owners I know spend rather more time worrying about the price of hay, vets' bills and whether the electric fencing is working than drinking champagne beside a five-star showjumping arena.

Maybe all these things have just come together in a perfect storm, but I do think we need to be a little careful about complaining that mainstream broadcasters aren't interested in us anymore. Perhaps we also need to ask ourselves whether we are giving the wider public enough reason to be interested.

Because maybe the real problem isn't losing the viewers who already love horse sport. We know where to find it.

Maybe we're losing the people who haven't discovered that they love it yet.

And I would genuinely love to know what other people think. Has horse sport been pushed out of mainstream television? Has it become too expensive and too elitist-looking for ordinary people to relate to? Are the welfare scandals starting to change how the public sees all equestrian sport? Or is specialist streaming simply the future and we should stop worrying about whether we're on the BBC at all?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: if you weren't already horsey, what would make you start watching horse sport today?

Would love your comments below.

Like this sort of horsey debate?

Subscribe to Grey Mare and I’ll let you know when the next article is published. No endless emails - just new pieces when there’s something worth talking about.