10/21/2025
I met David O'Connor at a meeting where he was announced as the first president of the US Equestrian Federation. His speech touted the USEF's mission as supporting equestrian competition with greatly increased funds.
The plan that he said would accomplish this mission was to follow the NASCAR business model of separate "celebrity" teams that could draw big sponsorship money and more spectators to equestrian competitions. Just as both the NASCAR drivers and their cars were celebrities, riders and their horses would be celebrities. Get it?
I got a chance to speak with him after and I told him that NASCAR teams compete in the same competition, and in the horse world each of the many disciplines have their own different competitions. I explained how the following the NASCAR model would separate the disciplines and turn them into market shares competing for sponsorship money. This was lost on O'Connor. He failed to see that this business concept would potentially fracture American horsemanship into separate discipline pieces, which it has.
Judy Berkley, a very experienced reporter, has written a deeply researched book, Off Course, about the inner workings of the USEF as it unfolded into the financial behemoth it is today. I see her book as a valuable historical document that I hope will be useful in accomplishing the desperately needed changes in the American horse world. I found much in it shocking.
The USEF's goal with their NASCAR-ish competing discipline teams has worked well for them in terms of their mission to significantly raise sponsorship money. It has been a huge financial success that has made the USEF a wealthy organization with an annual budget over $37 million. The USEF gets richer as it siphons off a percentage from their affiliate disciplines' revenue.
The cost of the USEF's financial success to the American equestrian public has been that US horsemanship standards have been chopped up into separate discipline standards aimed at meeting the expectations of donors, sponsors, breeders and show facilities. The result has been that everyday horse owners and riders outside the USEF realm have been caught up in the mess that the USEF's pandering to money has created. But this is another book to be written.
The book Off Course: explains the internal USEF causes of America's declining standards of horsemanship. Some causes are political or social that some will agree with and others not. But I think all will see these as irrelevant distractions from what should have been the USEF's goal, helping all US riders and horse owners improve their skills and the care of their horses.
People today accept our contemporary American horse world as if this is how it's always been, but this mess is relatively new. Abuse of horses has been normalized in several disciplines during the USEF's governing tenure. The cost of owning a horse has significantly increased, and the cost of competing a horse is now through the roof. The seeds of these and other struggles can be traced back to the cash driven industrial mindset at the USEF and its affiliates. If you want to know the details, read this book.
link to book purchase on Amazon -
www.amazon.com/OFF-COURSE-Duplicity-Equestrian-Federation/dp/B0F4PD7FKW/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2MST3LYGE64SA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YW-ESigN2eLzpZ6LsfRgbD3j5mhYXuk-YvJkMcn5aejOFb-ROHCLUMhEYnAp69-z4brwYSter7cKS7sjiMiFfTp3nzUKZA77Pn4Ngs_27698i4O56xN6XoLY6bPpaqCIyUbFzeCg_f-jIg0oVI4PjY0NOELK5anqbqrEHFTEkDVVd9ViBHopC7xJtPrF2speWutQgXVK4MZmppYRe9zdI_oIHiiRKebQU9nkyvwPx2Q.ZWsO8cmL66Ki2waGuFQM1SuzNv4NogucHAOPvLbzYRM&dib_tag=se&keywords=off+course+book&qid=1760983707&sprefix=off+course+book%2Caps%2C136&sr=8-3
