A dressage message.

Warning: contains needless profanity, because it needs it.

I told you I’d be watching quite a lot of sport now the Olympic Games have started. I’ve stayed up late, once by accident and once on purpose, to watch various stages of two triathlons. I’ve watched people swimming up and down in straight lines for quite some time and then snarled when the post win interviewer never gives them a couple more minutes to CATCH THEIR FUCKING BREATH! I’ve seen two almost naked males dive in almost exactly the same way at the same time, and it is genuinely nice to see Tom Daley rise above being a pretty, nearly gold medallist. I have found myself oddly fixated by the rugby sevens, a sport which looks so physically demanding it almost makes me slightly like rugby. And I have watched some gymnastics, because what’s not to like? Yes, I’ve watched a lot of sport. Oh, and dressage.

Fucking dressage. What the fuck is it? When did it become a sport? I can see the sport in gymnastics; how could you not when some perfectly formed human has completely rotated their body three times whilst flying and then landed on a thin strip of wood in such a way as to not send their genitals pulsing up through their spine at sixty miles an hour? I can see the sport in almost every Olympic sport, that’s why they’re called sports and the Olympics is a sporting event, but there is no way you will ever convince me dressage is a sport. You could just about persuade me that horse racing and horse jumping are sports as they involve energy and some rational level of competition, but dressage on the other hand is very simply no more than a rider and a horse fucking about on sawdust. They say it’s a way of training a horse so it is more comfortable to ride but surely it would be easier just to use a fucking cushion.

I’m not going to dignify or justify dressage by looking it up and finding out it’s origins. I can fairly safely and intelligently assume that it comes from all those vast military and regal horse parades, back when people who fought at the Battle of Waterloo and far beyond were still alive and the world had yet to acquire other distractions such as bungee jumping, the internet, Love Island and dogging. It must come from a time when people were so starved of excitement that they found some form of pleasure in watching a posh twat trot along on a horse in fancy dress and then making the horse do things that subsequently made the horse, and the rider, both look like a pair of pointless motherfuckers. True, horse racing and jumping may seem a bit cruel but it isn’t anywhere near as cruel as making a horse, unquestionably one of the animal world’s most elegant creatures, ponce around on tip toes as if performing a ballet on hot coals or trying to sneak into the back door of a chemists to score some ketamine.

I found myself properly glued to the skateboarding event a few days ago and I wondered what Edward VII or George V would have made of their Olympic Games if in the middle of a dressage wank-fest some cocksucker in baggy trousers had stood on a plank of wood with four wheels, started sliding down the bannister and then, upon reaching ground level had asked for a gold medal. I imagine they would have told them to fuck off. But times change, and now skateboarding is a sporting relevance (albeit also an massive irrelevance on most other levels) and that’s fine because there are plenty of sports that require assistance from, or manipulation of, a physical object to work effectively, but I somehow object to making a sport of sitting on a shiny, barrel-chested horse with cornrows and ribbons and, through endless hours of time wasting make it do nothing other than walk a bit funny, before it wanders off and takes a huge piss backstage. Honestly, is there really nothing better to be doing? If you enjoy growing older watching dressage you may as well at least read this too.

G B Hewitt. 28.07.2021