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Horse shows are not known for their gentleness. They are loud with comparison. Who moved up. Who moved down. Who got the catch ride. Who won the hack. Who was called back first. Who wasn’t.
Reputations travel quickly, and it’s easy to see competitors as threats. Scarcity can feel real. There is only one tricolor. Only one blue ribbon. But author and performance coach Brad Stulberg offers a different lens that may fundamentally shift how riders experience competition.
“The word compete,” he explains, “comes from the Latin roots co, which means with or together, and then petere, which means to aspire or to rise up.” In its truest form, he says, compete means “to rise up together.”
Competition Is Not the Enemy
Riders often assume that in order to perform well, they must detach from the people around them. Stay focused. Avoid eye contact. Block out the competition. But Stulberg argues that competition, when understood properly, is not about isolation. It’s about elevation.
“The whole point of competition,” he says, “is to rise up together to get the best out of yourself.”
Wanting to win is not the problem, but ego can be.
Stulberg makes a critical distinction: “Do you want to win? Absolutely. Is it okay to want to win and have intensity around that? Yes. But if you sacrifice the joy of the sport for that… then you’ve lost.”
That sacrifice can happen quietly. Riders stop appreciating beautiful rounds because they didn’t ride them. They start measuring their own worth against someone else’s ribbon count. They allow another rider’s success to diminish their own effort. And in doing so, they misunderstand what competition is offering them.
Your Rivals Are Raising You
Stulberg shares an example from endurance sport: many athletes’ most meaningful races were not the ones they won. They were the races where competitors pushed them to their personal bests.
“The races that are most memorable,” he says, “are the races that they didn’t win. But it was the fact that their competitors were pushing them so hard that allowed them to run their best race.”
Every rider who has felt the atmosphere of a championship class knows this phenomenon. You ride better because everyone else is riding better. It’s not a coincidence. Competition is not there to diminish you. It is there to stretch you.
Scarcity vs Aspiration
The tension in horse sport often comes from a scarcity mindset. Riders may believe that if someone else wins, there is less recognition and opportunity available for them. But Stulberg reframes the dynamic entirely. Competition is an environment that exposes your edges.
If another rider delivers a flawless trip, the instinct might be defensiveness. Comparison. Even resentment. But there is another option: curiosity.
What did they do differently? What was their pace? How did their horse look between fences? Where was their focus?
When competition is understood as “to rise together,” the success of others becomes instructional rather than threatening. Because the rider who spends mental energy resenting competitors has less available for performance.
The Switch All Elite Performers Make
There is, however, a nuance. Stulberg acknowledges that when it’s time to perform—“when the gun goes off”—elite athletes flip a switch. They step into the arena believing they belong there. They trust their training. They commit fully.
“Nobody else is going to be better than me because I’ve got this,” he describes.
When the whistle blows, you compete with total conviction. When the round is over, you return to humility and openness. That quick transition—confidence in the ring, curiosity outside of it—is one of the defining characteristics of sustainable excellence.
Without it, two things tend to happen. Riders either become defensive and ego-driven, or complacent and stagnant. Neither leads to growth.
Redefining Rivalry
The horse industry is uniquely relational. Riders share trainers, schooling rings, and often even horses over the course of a career. Rivalry is rarely clean-cut or distant. It is close. Personal. Interwoven.That makes perspective even more important.
When a barnmate wins, the easy reaction is comparison. The harder reaction (and the more powerful one) is to recognize that you are training in an environment that is raising the bar.
The rider who improves because she is surrounded by excellence benefits from proximity to it. In that sense, the most competitive barns are often the most collaborative. They create cultures where standards are high and improvement is collective. The pursuit of excellence is shared.
The Long Game
“Sometimes the chips fall your way. Other times they’re not,” Stulberg says. “What matters more is this longitudinal pursuit of just becoming the best athlete and becoming the best person you can be.”
That long view is essential in a sport measured in years, not months. Horses develop slowly. Partnerships deepen gradually. Confidence builds over time. When riders shift from scarcity to aspiration the show ring becomes less adversarial and more developmental.
Want more insight from Brad Stulberg? Listen to episode 471 of The Plaidcast and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform for conversations with the most influential voices in the equestrian world.
