April 22, 2016 
Horse sport, by definition, is all about history and tradition. Our modern ring and rodeo events may feel a world away from the field hunts, racing fields, and cattle ranches where they began, but that’s just the point. Our disciplines have had the benefit of hundreds of years to grow, evolve and develop. So just imagine what it would be like to create a horse sport completely from scratch. Sound crazy?
Not to Daniel Fowler-Prime and Tom Kilroy, the founders of Horseboarding UK. And if you haven’t yet heard of the extreme sport of Horseboarding—a sport which is rapidly growing in popularity across the Pond—chances are you will soon. Here’s how it works.
A Horseboarding “team” is comprised of one horse and two riders: the equestrian and a mountainboard rider, who’s towed behind the horse on a quick-release line no longer than 33 feet in length. During a competition, each team is required to negotiate two courses over a two-day period. The winner of each day is the riding pair that gets around the course without crashing—and with the fastest time. As you might expect, speed, accuracy, and guts play a big role here. But so does teamwork.
“In Horseboarding, you have three elements—three brains working as one,” says co-founder Tom Kilroy. “That’s why it’s such an intense team sport. One element, one brain gets it wrong, or is thinking something different, and the team falls apart.”
One of those three key “brains” is, of course, the horse. So what kind of mount makes a good candidate for Horseboarding? “A horse with a good attitude that wants to run,” Tom says, though when it comes to size and breeding, Horseboarding is an even playing field. “I’ve seen 14.1-hand ponies beat ex-Grand National horses,” Kilroy says.
Horseboarding UK holds training sessions for owners interested in learning about the sport and teaching their horses to pull a mountainboarder, but according to Kilroy, the process is fairly straightforward. “It’s about explaining it to [the horses] in a way where they understand what we are going to do, and that it’s awesomely fun.”
You can check out our horseboarding video, below, or trot on over to Horseboarding UK’s Facebook page to learn more.
