With all the fabulously whack sports that Penn State has to offer, something called Dressage really stuck out at me on the PSU list of club sports. At first I thought it had something to do with competitive dressing, like maybe who can dress or undress the fastest or even who can drink the most dressing in one sitting, but I was pretty disappointed when I found out it was just a form of Equestrian. So I’m sure most of you know what Equestrian is, or at least heard of it. If not, spoiler alert, it’s horse training.
![](https://sites.psu.edu/mackaypassion/files/2018/11/charlotte-dujardin-21wz2w7-300x300.jpg)
Equestrian is kind of a boring, white rich people sport and I’ve never even for a second liked it. I mean, no offense to those who like and do this sport, but seriously don’t you have better things to do than waste your time and money to train a horse to prance around and maybe jump over a little stupid ladder, oh wait you probably don’t cause you’re rich. Sorry, not sorry.
Okay, looking past my own prejudices and probably some form of animal cruelty–I don’t know how these horses are trained–this sport is actually pretty cool and what these horses are able to do is quite amazing. I won’t lie, I have no idea how these horses are able to do these things like I can’t even do half the shit they do and I’m a sentient being, like cmon.
Specifically, Dressage is considered the “highest expression” of Equestrian and is literally just a show of horses walking in circles in different ways, oh, how so exquisite. This “sport” (with emphasis on the quotation marks) is almost like horse dancing; the horses step in different rhythmic patterns and change up how they walk to look, oh, so exquisite. In my opinion, Dressage is just a worse version of Equestrian as it takes away all the “exciting” (again emphasis on the quotes) things in it like obstacle courses and horses jumping over things. Honestly, this sport is way more funny than it is exquisite. Take a look at this video of Dressage horses prancing around to the beat of Gangnam Style:
How exquisite, one might say, am I right. Well anyway, on Tuesday I decided to go try out this exquisite sport myself. I have a friend who goes to an animal shelter nearby every Tuesday so I decided to join her this week. She goes to play with the puppies, but my purpose for being there was serious, I had work to do. For about an hour an a half, I trained an 8 month old puppy which I named “Exquisite” to perform Dressage in the highest expression. Exquisite and I practiced walking over and over again, working to perfect the art of rhythmic prancing. After our time together, I can proudly say that Exquisite and I got absolutely nowhere as he was just way too cute to take seriously, and kept distractingly gnawing on me. I guess it’s just a horses sport.
So if you are interested in joining the Penn State Dressage Club which is a subset of the Penn State Equestrian Team, I have no information whatsoever about where they meet and what they do, but I do have this link to some site about PSU Dressage. Happy travels.
The repetition of the word “exquisite” and the rest of the humor helped instill that sense of ridiculousness mixed with mild amounts of information that your other blog posts have. The video was also a nice touch. The inclusion of the short story, the not so subtle criticisms of the sport, and the general flow of the post all made it a legitimately fun read. It never seems like I’m slogging through paragraphs of dull text with this blog.
“I’m thinking about horses…” (great Mansions album check it out). Penn State never fails to make a club for anything and everything. Horses always confused me, to be honest. They’re these huge animals that we domesticated to ride and put huge amounts of weight on them. They could easily attack and kill a rider, yet we allow children to ride them all the time, kinda weird right? Probably got a little deep with this comment but as I said, Horses are freaking weird to me.
I don’t know how I feel about this sport. It seems like it would take so much time and patience and the result is a horse that looks like it is limping, rather than dancing. I would say that this “sport” perfectly fits the theme of your blog. Great post!
I love the humor you interjected into this post! You did well in describing the so-called sport while also letting us know your stance on its ruling as a sport. I especially loved your story about trying to teach the puppy-nice touch!