Horse, skip and jump

Grunts, neighs, highs and lows... what's show jumping all about? Hear it from the horse's mouth...

Transcript

00:00I'm a professional show jumper.

00:22Show jumping is an Olympic sport, it's been around for a really long time.

00:52Horses, in general, teach you a lot of patience because at the end of the day, it's a sport

01:06where your football can talk back or your cricket bat can have a really serious disagreement

01:10with you.

01:18As long as I can remember, I've been on a horse and I've been happiest on a horse.

01:21I don't like walking, which is the only horse cavalry regiment in the world, so we pretty

01:36much grew up with horses in our backyard and it was sort of a no-brainer.

01:45My hand-eye coordination wasn't the best.

01:54There's no way that you can force a 600 kg animal to do something that he or she doesn't

01:58want to do.

02:15The year of the Asian Games, where I was the youngest member of the Indian contingent that

02:19had qualified after, I think, almost 12 years.

02:22And I was pretty much training in my backyard, it was a hobby.

02:25I was working at Google at the time and it somehow turned out to be a profession.

02:40There are n number of clubs that are opening up in and around Delhi and NCR, I think they'd

02:45be upward of at least 40.

02:47It's grown at roughly 100% a year over the last three years at least.

02:59We have about five students at any given time.

03:02We have right at present about 40 horses.

03:10The typical mindset would be like, okay, you're a show jumper, you need to jump more often.

03:13And that's totally not the approach that we have.

03:17We focus on the other parts surrounding the jumping first, and then maybe a little bit

03:22of jumping.

03:31Hermes' first client was actually the horse.

03:33They used to make harnesses in the 1800s for horses.

03:35They came on board as someone who was going to help me and my top horses, at least, not

03:40all the horses, but the top horses, they're going to help saddle them up, get them up.