06/22/2026
There are a lot of people in the industry today talking about what’s wrong, Parker Worthington writes. The judges are inconsistent. The courses are uninspired. The clients have no feel. The young trainers don’t know anything. The sport is not what it used to be. The whole enterprise, frankly, is in decline.
And the strange thing, and the thing worth examining, is that these are often people who have been in the sport for decades. People who have seen extraordinary things and ridden extraordinary horses and built real careers out of something they once loved with an uncomplicated, hungry passion. Somewhere along the way, that passion curdled. The curiosity dried up. And what moved in to fill the space was a very specific brand of negativity that masquerades as wisdom but is, in reality, something much simpler.
It is the outlook of someone who has stopped learning.
This is not a criticism dressed up as an observation. It is an invitation, because the antidote is not positivity, not the type that is forced, performative, relentlessly upbeat positivity that papers over real problems and pretends everything is fine. The antidote is something more durable and more interesting than that. It is curiosity. Active, genuine, slightly restless curiosity about what else there is to know, what else there is to try, and what the person next to you, especially if they are younger and newer and less certain of everything, might be able to teach you.
The people in this sport who age most gracefully (not in years, but in spirit) are almost universally the ones who never stopped asking questions. The trainer who at sixty is still auditing clinics not because they need the basics explained but because they want to see how someone else approaches a problem. The horsewoman who has won everything worth winning but will still sit ringside and watch a junior eq class with genuine attention, not to critique but to observe. The professional who makes a point of spending real time with the young riders and grooms and working students in their orbit, not to dispense wisdom from on high but to actually listen to what they are experiencing and seeing and feeling.
These people are not naive. They know the sport has problems. They know the economics are hard, and the judging is imperfect, and the pressure on young people is sometimes excessive, and the horses don’t always get the deal they deserve. But they hold all of that alongside something else completely. Alongside genuine enthusiasm for what is working, what is improving, who is emerging, what is possible. They are net contributors to the energy of whatever room they walk into, and everyone in that room can feel it.
📎 Continue reading this article at https://www.theplaidhorse.com/2026/06/15/curiosity-is-the-antidote-to-cynicism/
📸 © Heather N. Photography
