The Detail: How to ride a horse, if you don't have a horse

RNZ News

a day ago

What started as child's play has become a serious sport around the world.
Photo:
Alastair Goodwin
Alastair Goodwin remembers standing in front of an obstacle course, hobby horse in hand, and questioning the choices that had led him and his co-founder to that spot.
"We were the biggest sceptics," he said. "The couple of hours before we started, we were just like, 'What the hell are we doing?'"
After the event kicked off and
crowds started lining the perimeters of the course
, Goodwin - who co-founded Hobby Horsing New Zealand with Tony Sundman - tells
The Detail
all his worries evaporated.
"It's like, sceptics be damned, people have a really good time and a lot of people have a good laugh."
The children's hobby of 'riding' a stick with a horse head on it has been around for centuries, but it wasn't until the early 2000s that it was taken more seriously.
Riding a stick with a horse head on it has been around for centuries.
Photo:
Alastair Goodwin
Finland was the
first country to embrace it
and the sport there is largely dominated by pre-teen girls.
Oscar-nominated Finnish film maker Selma Vilhunen is widely credited with bringing the sport
into the mainstream
with her 2017 film,
Hobbyhorse Revolution
.
While it sounds like a bizarre game of childhood make-believe, hobby horsing is taken incredibly seriously in some parts of the world. The
horses are often handmade
and the goal is to make them look as realistic as possible.
Many riders will train for different events, competing in the likes of dressage, show jumping and western riding.
In recent decades, the sport has taken off. It's estimated about 10,000 Finnish people take part and it's on the rise here as well.
"We get a lot of emails from people setting up [events] around the place and I know there's another organisation over in Hawkes Bay that does it," says Goodwin. "It is building, which is bizarre."
He says it's a lot more laidback here.
"We're just trying to promote it as a concept and, if people want to run with it and do the kind of high-end level of it, then that's good for them," he says.
Another sport rising in the ranks of popularity here is pickleball.
The sport is a mix of tennis, badminton and table tennis, and has nothing to do with pickles.
"Three dads were at home with their kids during winter, and the kids were bored and the dads were getting a bit frustrated, so they thought, 'Right, let's see what we can find', and they made the game of pickleball up," says Ange Brady, the Hawke's Bay representative on the Pickleball Association of New Zealand board.
The game is designed to include the whole family, from grandchild to grandparent.
"Generally, it's played in doubles," Brady says. "You've got two people each side of the net and you can only score a point off your serve."
While it began as a fun family sport, pickleball has evolved. Brady says both America and Australia have professional league teams, and there's an annual world cup competition.
New Zealand sent two teams over to last year's World Cup. The open team made it to the quarter finals and the 50+ team came second out of the 22 participating countries.
There's even talk of it becoming an Olympic sport, but for that to happen, Brady says there need to be some changes at the governing level.
"There are currently two governing bodies for pickleball across the world," she says. "We need to have one governing body for the sport and a bit of consistency of what that looks like around the world, because you obviously need to have criteria that you would meet across all of the countries in order to select the team."
Whether or not it makes an appearance at a future Olympic games, Brady says pickleball is a sport for everyone.
"I hear stories of kids lining up at lunchtime and morning teatime to play at schools. Then we've got pickleball available all through the day for everybody, right through until the evening for those who still have to work a fulltime job, and then across the weekends.
"Once you start playing, you just find your people."
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