Celebrities Who Are Secretly Serious Equestrians

Being photographed on a horse makes you an equestrian in roughly the way being photographed next to a piano makes you a pianist. The people below have done the real thing: they hold titles, awards or offices that the sport's own governing bodies have on record.

We have kept this list to what is documented by registries, federations and results sheets, so it is shorter than most. The “secretly” is only that their day jobs tend to get the headlines.

William Shatner

The man who commanded the Enterprise has spent decades in two very different show rings. With American Saddlebreds he won the Amateur Gentleman’s Three-Gaited World’s Championship on a horse called CH Talent Contest, and he is a long-time Quarter Horse breeder and reining competitor. In 2018 the National Reining Horse Association gave him its Dale Wilkinson Lifetime Achievement Award. He has also hosted the Hollywood Charity Horse Show in Los Angeles for more than two decades.

Lyle Lovett

The same NRHA award carries the name of the Texan singer-songwriter, who has been an owner and breeder of reining horses for many years and a steady supporter of the sport. Reining is the Western discipline of spins, circles and long sliding stops, and it is ridden almost entirely on Quarter Horses.

Carson Kressley

Best known as a television presenter and stylist, Kressley is a fixture of the Saddlebred world. He is credited with world titles at the World’s Championship Horse Show in Louisville, including the amateur gentlemen’s five-gaited class with a horse called Enchanting Memories, and he won the Show Pleasure Driving grand championship at the Lexington Junior League Horse Show in 2020. The American Saddlebred Horse Association has given him its Gordon Jenkins International Award, and he served for fifteen years on the board of the American Saddlebred Museum.

Bella Hadid

Hadid’s ring is the cutting pen, where a horse and rider separate one cow from the herd and keep it there. The National Cutting Horse Association named her its 2024 Limited Age Event Rookie of the Year, and in December 2024 she was Limited Amateur Reserve Champion at the NCHA World Championship Futurity in Fort Worth, riding Metallic Hardball. Cutting is not a sport you can pose your way through: the cow has not read the script.

Bo Derek

For nearly seven years, from 2008 to 2015, the actress sat on the California Horse Racing Board, the body that regulates racing in the state, where she served as vice chair and chaired its medication and track safety committee. Away from the racetrack her horses are Iberian: she has long owned Andalusians and Lusitanos.

Patrick Swayze

An Arabian, the breed Patrick Swayze owned and showed.

The late actor was a committed Arabian owner who showed his own horses at breed shows in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His stallion Tammen, bought in 1991, won a string of halter championships the following year. After his death in 2009 the Arabian Horse Foundation set up a youth scholarship in his name.

Martin Clunes

The British actor has been President of the British Horse Society since 2011. He keeps horses at home in Dorset, among them an 18-hand Clydesdale called Bruce, and presented the documentaries Horsepower and Heavy Horsepower, the second of which is about exactly what you would hope.

A Clydesdale. Not Bruce, but the family resemblance is there.

The royal riders

Royalty and horses is hardly a secret, but the competition records are better than most people realise.

• Princess Anne won the individual European eventing title at Burghley in 1971 on Doublet, took individual silver at the 1975 Europeans on Goodwill, and rode Goodwill at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the first member of the British royal family to compete at a Games.
• Zara Tindall, her daughter, was European champion in 2005 and world champion in 2006, both on Toytown, and won team silver at London 2012 on High Kingdom.
• Queen Elizabeth II bred and raced Thoroughbreds all her life. She was Britain’s champion owner on the Flat in 1957, her horses won four of the five Classics, and in 2013 her filly Estimate won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot.

Riders first, famous second

A few people sometimes filed under “celebrity” are simply dedicated show jumpers who happen to have well-known surnames, and their results stand on their own:

• Jessica Springsteen won team silver for the United States at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, riding Don Juan van de Donkhoeve.
• Georgina Bloomberg won team bronze at the 2015 Pan American Games.
• Eve Jobs won team bronze at the 2019 Pan American Games.
• Jennifer Gates was the 2017 USEF Under-25 national show jumping champion.

And Superman

We have already told the story of Tom Welling’s move from Smallville to a sport horse ranch, along with that of an earlier Clark Kent, Christopher Reeve, who took up eventing in his thirties.

Who we left out, and why

Quite a few famous names ride, own horses or turn up at shows, and the entertainment press is happy to call all of them “accomplished equestrians”. Where we could not find the results or records to back that up, we left them off. That is no comment on their riding. If a federation publishes the scores, we will happily add them.

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