Curious about Horses and Eventing/ShowJumping

[NeighNeighAndthrice]

If you have a child/teenager who does eventing or show jumping, please can someone tell me a bit about moving horses to UK competitions?

So if you own your own horse (for your child) and you stable it somewhere, how does it get moved to the location of the competition which are all round the country?

Do stables offer this service?
Or are you expected to have your own horse box and move it yourself for the child?
Or are there specialist horse moving companies?

How does the teenager/child get there? do you have to take them every time or does the stables/horse moving let them go in the car towing the horse box?

How much does it cost to move a horse?

why do people do this if they are very amateur? I mean I understand the principel of doing something for fun but the hassle of moving a horse from near London for a five hour drive seems crazy to me. Why not just do it closer to home?

I saw a random instagram feed of a 16 year old who does this and it blew my mind how often they seen to be off at different events round the country.

Do your parents need to be loaded to do this?

You can either own or rent a trailer to pull behind your car. Or own or rent a box to self drive, or hire someone to drive you in their trailer to the show, wait for you while you compete and drive you home. Yes it can be expensive.

thanks @Grateeggspectations
what is the standard/norm though - do the stables provide moving services?

how much does it cost to hire a driver with a trailer?

My mind is blown by how much effort this must be for the parents if a child has this as a hobby.

I don’t know how usual it is for livery yards to offer transport, some may have a trailer for hire. Most people who compete have their own lorries or trailers. It’s a very expensive hobby once you start competing!

What @Grateeggspectations said. It's not cheap. If you buy / rent a trailer you need a car that can tow, and be able to drive it which I refuse to do!

Cost depends on distance and duration.

My kids' yard has a truck that you can hire and split costs with other people
Going to the same event.

OP yes indeed, if you have a child or you yourself have a horse you want to compete then its down to you to get there. Either buy your own transport or hire it with a driver or hire a self-drive lorry. People drive from one side of the country to the other just to do a 5 minute dressage test which sounds mad but its completely normal! If you are a horsey parent then you have to be a) quite well off and b) very resilient because, with horses, there is usually a lot of effort involved for very little reward!

Firstly, horse people are crazy! That's why we get up at 4am to drive horse + child 100 miles for a 5 min SJ round or a 3 min dressage test.
If your child is competing at national level in either Eventing or SJ yes basically you have to be pretty well off. An overnight stay away where horse is stabled at a competition can easily cost £300+ for the weekend if you include entry fees, stable hire + bedding etc but not including diesel/petrol and hire of the wagon (if you don't have one yourself).
Good wagon is from 25K+ (easy pay 80-100k). Good horse is around that too.

Competing is just insanely expensive. The entry fees, stabling, smart gear, having a wagon (they break down a remarkable amount IME too!). I used to BE a lot in but it was just getting untenable

Others have answered well but to answer some more of your questions, yes many large livery yards will have some kind of means of transport available, not so much as a formal service that is offered to all clients but more of a favour available if you make friends with the right people. On my yard for instance the yard owner has a large 6 horse capacity lorry and if she is going to a competition with her own horses and has spare space she'll offer that to liveries (based purely on who she likes or wants to offer the opportunity to that day) in exchange for petrol money, same with others who are serious competitors and have their own transport with spare capacity. Others without their own transport may club together and hire a van for the day if they want to go somewhere (there are various local companies we use, self drive if someone has the right license or with a driver if not). It's 100% never a guarantee you can secure a spot for a given day though, as I say it's not something the yard promise to all liveries at all, there's exactly as much favouritism and cliqueyness and arguments and hurt feelings around who goes where with whom as you might imagine. If your child is a serious competitor with national team/Olympic aspirations, pretty much the only way to guarantee they can compete regularly where and when they want is to purchase your own transport and learn to drive it yourself (requires trailer and/or HGV license) or hire a driver I guess. Very pricey on top of buying the pony and livery bills and tuition and everything else but that's how it goes, you can see why the sport (not unfairly) gets accused of elitism.

I don't want you to get the impression that every child/person that rides, even the very serious amateur competitors are not necessarily shooting up and down the country in expensive lorries every single weekend. Most kids make do with informal events, lessons and competitions (often through pony club) that are held on their own yard or within hacking distance, or at least much much closer than a 5 hour drive (my own DD was a pretty good rider and on all the PC teams and we only went that far away once, for a national comp she qualified for, and it was a huge hassle and endeavour, not something we'd repeat regularly). It's not all fancy glossy professional events like you see on telly or social media, lots of kids cut their teeth on scruffy local grassroots stuff.

It's possible albeit not easy to make it as a professional without your parents investing a fortune in you as a kid, the route for talented young riders is to become a working pupil with a competitive professional in their chosen discipline at the age of 16-18, they need to have proven their ability to get a place as a WP of course but this doesn't have to have been being on national junior squads or whatever. They then base themselves and their horse with the pro and usually part of their 'wages' is transport with the pro to relevant shows or use of the pro's transport, and they work their way up that way. Or there are many other routes to working in the industry or being a high level compete amateur. Going to one of the racing schools and working in racing is just one (doesn't even require you to have learnt to ride as a child) or getting a high paying 'normal' job and running your own string and transport from your wages is another...

My dd was in a pony club. It accommodated all levels. She's sign up for what she wanted to do, there would be a fee to compete.

We'd go with a friend who had a horse box or we'd hire one for the day, about £90.
I'd take her, she'd sign in and the organisers would tell us where she had to be at what time.

gosh. wow. mind still blown. thanks for your answers. I also hadn't thoguht about the time (4 or 5 mins action) versus travel time.

@longdistanceclaraclara
My kids' yard has a truck that you can hire and split costs with other people
Going to the same event.

This makes sense as to how it becomes more economical.

@maxelly thanks for taking the time to give such a full answer.

I literally can't get my head round this at all. The children must be obsessed in order to get parents to do this!

I can't imagine being that interested in anything at all to go to that much effort and expense. It's like people camping out overnight to be first in the sales line or get a ticket for a popconcert to be first in the queue - it's just too much effort.

Also, if you'll just indulge me in putting on my nostalgia hat for a minute (as I frequently do on here), things have hugely changed since I was a child on ponies 50 years ago (and quite a lot since my kids were 20 years ago). When I was a kid we had lots of small local showgrounds with an hour's hack of our yard and many of the local landowners and farmers opened their land up annually for hunter trials (local form of grassroots eventing semi-connected to the local hunt). Every village virtually had it's own summer fair and a lot of them had showjumping classes or fun classes like chase me Charlie or mounted games alongside the fruit and vegetable classes and guess the weight of the pig! In the summer us kids could take our ponies out somewhere most weekends without needing to get on a lorry and without much by way of parental input (the roads were so much quieter then, it was considered perfectly safe to let under 12s hack their own ponies to events up to an hour away, stay all day then hack an hour home afterwards. Possibly this was unwise given what we got up to on occasions 😬 but it certainly made us better riders and no room for a tantrum in the passenger seat on the way home if you'd fallen off either, as you had no choice but to ride back if you wanted to get home at all! It was also much more common for farmers kids to have ponies and for further away things like county shows someone's dad would often offer up their sheep van or some kind of other only semi-roadworthy vehicle😜 to take us all there. I'm not pretending we were Dickensian urchins or anything, we were of course relatively privileged kids still, but it was perfectly plausible for the daughter or son of say a very small-scale farmer or the local postie or shopkeeper to keep a scruffy pony on someone's bit of land and take it around to all the local shows and win plenty of cups and ribbons which just really wouldn't be plausible today.

Even by my DD's time with a combination of increased health and safety/insurance/safeguarding culture plus changing rural lifestyles and land usage, that network of grassroots type small local shows was disappearing to be replaced with much more 'proper' professionally run events held in purpose built venues rather than someone's field/back garden, which kids of course then had to be transported to, and while she was allowed from the age of 12ish to hack out with her friends, I wouldn't have dreamt of letting her go off all day to a show without an adult there to supervise. And today's kids with so much traffic on the roads often don't go out hacking at all (or under heavy adult supervision if they do). Hence needing so much transport if you want a change of scenery...

The foxhunting ban (not something I'd morally disagree with personally mind you) has also really changed the face of eventing in particular and horse sports in general over the last 25 years as lots of local landowners and what not shut up their events that had been largely kept going off goodwill to and mutual dependency on the hunt, or they converted to doing dog shows or garden fetes or whatever else is considered lower risk and more popular with the public today. So again pushing the horsey events back to the proper equestrian venues. Kids today also by and large learn to jump in very controlled conditions and in an arena over showjumps rather than on the hunting field which is again, perhaps not a bad thing overall but does change our risk perception around letting little kids loose over fixed obstacles...

Horses are 99% effort and 1% riding!
Horse ownership usually involves getting up at a ridiculous time most mornings (especially in winter), trudging through rain + mud at 6am and then again at 6pm. So for us spending a weekend at a show is actually easy work 😆.
It is a lifestyle not a hobby BUT most owners/riders don't spend most weekends on the road competing. At our yard around 2 out of 20 liveries compete, the rest are more sensible and just pootle around on hacks with occasional lessons.

I can't get over current costs for BE, it is insane! They are pricing grassroot riders out. I understand the reasons for the costs but affiliation is ridiculous

Depends how seriously they are competing - DH and I upgraded from a 4x4 and trailer to a 7.5t lorry but we would be off almost every weekend doing fun rides in the summer or competing at dressage or showjumping. We only ever travelled about an hour (luckily we had lots of fun rides and competition venues nearby).

We did always used to offer a space in the lorry (carried 3 horses) to a friend and if one of us couldn't ride we would take 2 friends.

We were very amateur so would never have gone 100's of miles/ several hours (longest journeys were when we would take the horses on holiday for a week).

@maxelly they were good days, sad all those local shows are gone now.
For some reason yesterday I was thinking about when you'd send off SAEs at the start of show season & the excitement when the schedules arrived in the post, planning which shows & classes to do.
DD did the grassroots NSEA regionals at Hickstead last week. We live half an hour away but got to the yard at 8 and didn't get back til 4! All for 1 round of showjumping, we did watch her friends but it's nonsense the amount of time it takes not to mention taking day off work. We generally only do local stuff & I was amazed by the number of competitors and of course the huge lorries, top dollar ponies. Some of them had travelled hours & rented overnight stabling. It's mad!

Ex showjumper here who was a successful junior. We had our own transport and every weekend was travelling to competitions throughout the summer season (I rarely competed in winter). Early mornings, long days, stay away shows and very supportive parents.

Well to be fair while equestrian sports are up there in terms of £££ spent by parents helping their kids (along with maybe sailing, karting/motor sports and perhaps some winter sports if UK based), based on experience of friends who have supported their kids to high level of performance/eventual professional aspirations in other fields such as dance, music, other sports, I don't think horsey parents are in any way unique in terms of time and effort put in to support their kids or even % of income spent - I know parents who scrape together literally every spare penny, going without themselves to be able to afford their kids dance costume or summer football camp or whatever - I guess if it's your kids passion and might turn into a career you'll do whatever you can to support their ambitions. Like other posters have said as well, horses do tend to be a lifestyle and one the whole family participates in, with a lot of successful child riders their parents are also horsey (or at least the mum is lol, often the dad is just along for the ride) so the child's costs kind of get absorbed into the whole family if that makes sense?

I've learnt so much. Thank you everybody. That's so interesting about grassroots changes. I guess it's probably true of many life sectors that things have changed for the worse because of health and safety regulations means people stop offering activities at a lower level across the board.

I don't think horsey parents are in any way unique in terms of time and effort put in to support their kids or even % of income spent - I know parents who scrape together literally every spare penny, going without themselves to be able to afford their kids dance costume or summer football camp or whatever

Yes but they don't have to move a horse! Football boots or a spangly costume aren't massive mounds of living muscle that need to be fed, groomed and transported around the country. Even having to move a harp or a double bass doesn't come close. Although now I think of it having a harpist or double bass child can't be much comedy either!

@NeighNeighAndthrice yes I think running a pony and child is a massive task, we have 3 in total including mine, its like a second job. But its a big thing I share with my DD and I am horsey already, which does add to the workload as when I am back with the pony still need to sort the others, you need to be very organised and committed and it is extremely expensive, not a side hobby that is contained its hours of work most days but will the privilege of spending some beautiful days together and having a freedom in the countryside which is rare now. We are lucky enough to still have some local shows but I agree the weather and risk is shutting them down....

As long as you have a suitable towing car then buying a secondhand trailer is a relatively economical option. We’d get ours serviced once a year for about £100 and when I sold it, got slightly more than I’d paid for it originally. So for pony club rallies and localish events it was by far the cheapest form of transport and I loved the spontaneity it offered - if you’re reliant on hiring a van/driver you tend to have to book way in advance only for the horse to go lame the day before ... I didn’t like driving it more than a couple of hours though and I hated reversing it if there were loads of people watching (for some reason I could reverse it into a tiny spot on the yard when we got back but if there were people watching my reversing skills would vanish in a puff of smoke 😳). We have now got a 7.5 lorry as it’s much nicer having somewhere dry to sit in and make a cup of tea and hang out with the dogs instead of struggling to fit everything in the car boot.

It is hugely expensive and time consuming having a child who competes in equestrian disciplines. We compete in a very small discipline - this is not my regular MN name as we are pretty well known in the discipline we do. We travel the length and breadth of the country most weekends to compete through the summer, and are just about to travel to Europe to take part in the junior world championships of our discipline. This competition alone is costing us somewhere in the region of £3500 for transport, entry fees and accommodation. Earlier in the month we made an 18hr round trip in the lorry for the British championship. I think it cost about £350 in diesel, but I try not to look too closely at the costs as it’s a bit scary.

It is immense fun though. DC who competes in this sport has had a very exciting few years - 3 British titles, 7th at the last world championships, friends from all around the world.

I’m a bit (well, a lot actually!) disappointed in their decision to take a step back while they’re at uni, as I believe that at the 2026 world championship we would have a junior team capable of a medal, and DC would be the cornerstone of that team. On the plus side though, it will allow me to spend that time and effort more on my own horse and competition plans (and on my other DC who is often the neglected one while their sibling is competing.)

@maxelly @snowpo I too remember those days fondly! Up at 5am to cycle to the stables and get the horse groomed and plaited before hacking to the gymkhana, only to have to regroom and replait as the wretched creature had got so excited on the walk that it sweated up and rubbed all the plaits out. I was SO envious of the public school children whose mum or groom would prepare their ponies then lead them out of the lorry ready for the pristine "pink and white" child to mount and win first prize for turnout

Nothing compared to the anticipation of going to the local vets/feed merchants and grabbing all the show schedules at the start of the spring/summer to work out which to go to and what classes to enter.

Ha! I always did absolutely terribly at any kind of showing or especially best turned out where I was last every single time, it didn't help of course that all my gear was ill-fitting and second hand/hand-me-down and my pony was some kind of heinz 57 cob cross with a bog-brush mane and tail that I definitely couldn't plait properly (probably should have hogged him and turned him out as a show cob in hindsight but I didn't know how to do that either, I'm not sure we even owned clippers!). But even if I had had a parent or groom to help get us both sparkling clean and pink and white with hair ribbons and polished boots ( which I very much did not😁), I inevitably had some kind of puddle or bush-related mishap hacking to the show anyway, or would decide for my own reasons to shortcut through a bog or something, and would have turned up looking like Stig of the Dump regardless 😳

Good job we were pretty nifty in the mounted games, handy pony and the jumping or would definitely have been a lot of dejected rides home for me!

I think you might be my spiritual twin @maxelly!! with the same cob pony and always the one with the dirty mark on the clean boots or jods with the hair that never stayed neatly in it's net.

Most people with children competing have their own transport (we have a 4x4 and trailer).

There are professional horse transport companies but it's a much more expensive way of doing it, and of course there's no guarantee of a driver always being available.

When shows run over several days there are usually Stables on site which you can hire for the duration. Child would mostly have to be taken by parents, generally a transport company wouldn't take a child alongside as its too much responsibility and they may not be insured.

Some shows are championships which have qualifiers, hence a lot of travel!

Dare I say it, yes you need deep pockets. Myself and exH are not by any means rich, but we put absolutely every single penny we have into it and do all the work ourselves, to the detriment of having any real lives of our own 🤦‍♀️🤣🤣