THE MARMITE CRUSADE OF SUSAN WACHOWICH
A MUMSHAYNET EXCLUSIVE
She has been labelled unhinged, a bitch, a troll, a stirrer, a liar, and even a ‘living Satan.’ To others she is an important voice for horse welfare and a force for change.
Welcome to the world of Susan Wachowich – the face and founder of Dressage Hub.
Born and raised on a cattle ranch, Susan has been around horses for most of her life. At the age of 12, she trained a three-year-old OTTB to Young Riders level before progressing to warmbloods and working to Grand Prix, at which point she hung up her spurs.
“People assume I didn’t have the talent or I didn’t have the money to continue, but I didn’t have the ethics,” Susan says bluntly. “I wasn’t willing to do what it takes to get there.”
‘Doing what it takes to get there’ is currently the hot potato in dressage circles – a discipline that was already reeling from social licence discussions when the Charlotte Dujardin video torpedoed the worst excesses of the sport into the spotlight.
For Susan, the upset on the eve of the Olympics was a validation of sorts. She has been holding dressage riders to account for years.
“I’m like a gang member that’s defected,” she tells MumsHaynet. “I’ve seen the inside, I left, and now I’m talking.”
Interestingly, the talking Susan employs in interview is good-natured, measured, and devoid of the, sometimes, feverish delivery of a new expose posted on her YouTube channel and social media pages.
For many years, her close-to-delighted take down of some of the sport’s most respected riders have made her a divisive figure, with her posts often dismissed as the work of a malicious crank.
And yet, she has never been sued. A notable achievement in a world where money appears to be no object.
“I don’t pick apart people’s riding, I don’t criticise amateur riders or even look at what they do, I only pick apart signs of abuse by the professionals,” Susan says. “Over the years, the FEI has tried to shut me down, the USEF has tried the same thing.
“My attorney handles it all because the accusations don’t have any legs, they are just trying to silence me.
“The second they have some legs I’m in trouble and my lawyer is going to let me know I’m in trouble.”
Vilified
Ironically, Dressage Hub started out as a platform not to expose everything that was wrong with the sport, but rather to educate riders wanting to progress in it.
Having struggled to find the calibre of Grand Prix training she needed in Canada, Susan had taken her dressage ambitions to Florida, only to see the dream unravel as relations with a trainer soured over a financial matter.
“Dressage Hub was devised as a video platform to bridge the knowledge gap with training videos,” says Susan.
However, as the wagons circled around their own in Florida, Susan found herself vilified and under attack.
“They said I was a wanted felon in three states and in Canada, that I was an illegal immigrant, that I was sleeping with people’s husbands. They were really horrible to me.
“They created me as this monster without me ever having done anything worthy of being deemed a monster.
“It never made sense, but if you have ever dealt with a narcissist, it never makes sense.”
As a result of the backlash, and having seen enough to feel deeply uncomfortable with the ‘whatever it takes’ approach to Grand Prix riding, Susan sold her horse “down” the levels and used the money to get herself established in the US.
“Horse people are not always great at making logical financial decisions, but I felt like that was a very logical decision to make,” she says with a laugh, though it’s clear she was left bruised if not bloodied from the Florida experience. It also left her educated.
“I was in Florida in 2012 and I would sit with Jacqueline Brooks’ mum and watch every single GP test with her. She helped me learn to watch it.
“It’s funny when people say I’m not an expert, but I’ve probably watched more GPs than most judges. I watched all the CDIs (Concours de Dressage International), learning and seeing how horses and riders react, what their stress points are, and why I can call out riders on a bad day because I’ve seen them on a good day.
“I think that’s one of the things people underestimate, is how much time I actually spent watching these riders.”
Dressage Hub first came on the scene in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2017 that Susan posted “a bad video of any rider.”
Even then, for many years she says she kept to videos of sporting highlights because she simply didn’t want to deal with the backlash, deciding only in the last year to start adding her voice and opinion.
“I realised that people really didn’t know what was happening,” Susan explains. “How many times have we heard it ‘was just a moment in time’, ‘this is what horses do’? We’ve a gap in our education where people don’t understand that this is not normal.
“These horses are being badly abused, but if I’d come out in 2017 and said they were using bungees in training, or marshmallow fluff to hide blue tongues, or that their sides were full of bullet holes from spurs, nobody would have listened. They weren’t ready for that.
“I had to go through a journey of showing people what was happening until they got to a place where they were ready to receive the information.”
Triggers
For Susan, the logic is simple – talk about things going wrong, so people can see that they’re going wrong, and then talk can happen about why it’s going wrong.
“When I first talked about marshmallow fluff in 2017, people were so mad. Yet, literally every barn has fluff in it. I don’t think it’s even necessarily the worst thing, and it’s not always covering up blood and blue tongues, though at the upper levels it’s definitely covering up those things, but a year later Astrid from Eurodressage did an article and everyone was like, ‘Oh fluff is a thing now!’”
Surprisingly, Susan is not in the slightest bit upset that Astrid Appels, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, gets an easier ride of things.
“I appreciate what Astrid does at Eurodessage because she kind of balances out a lot of the things that I say that triggers people. She says it respectfully and balanced.
“I realise that the way I deliver information is triggering, but that’s part of being a YouTuber, whereas Astrid says it nice and polite and people consume it differently. And that’s OK, we need that balance.”
For many of Susan’s denouncers, balance isn’t a word they would associate with the Dressage Hub founder and many stars of the Grand Prix stage have pushed back, including Carl Hester, albeit “very politely.”
Elsewhere, the outrage Susan has triggered has led to a constant stream of online derision, abuse, and even death threats.
As brash as she may come across, Susan admits to feeling unsafe in certain parts of America now.
“It reached that level a long time ago,” she admits. “I have files with the police on anybody who has given me death threats. I keep them all in a file and I keep it updated. I keep a track record of everything.
“Whenever I am in Florida, I put up a ridiculous number of security cameras, I have two protection dogs, and I’m a concealed carrier which, as a Canadian, I thought I would never do as it is totally against my core beliefs, but it has reached the point where I don’t think I can go without.”
Given the level of disruption in her own life, it is little surprise to hear that Susan has no sympathy for Dujardin’s incredible fall from grace.
“You make your choice, you make your bed, you lie in it. I have trained two horses to Grand Prix and I didn’t train them like that to get there,” she says.
However, for Susan, Dressage Hub isn’t simply a way to call out the bad guys, it’s a necessary evil to stop the rot becoming the accepted norm.
“It’s really hard to find positive things at the top of the sport, but Becky Moody did great at the Olympics and Justina Vanagaitė is incredible. She’s the one that’s doing things her own way. Lewis Carrier in the UK and Ryan Torkkeli in Canada are also among the good and gifted riders out there that you don’t hear so much about.
“But I have had people walk me through barns and tell me how other people are training, like these are the gadgets they are using, the electric spurs, the weighted boots.
“And while I’ve never actually seen anyone use bungees, when the Cesar Parra video came out, I said I knew it. I knew it! I had been asking all along what was being used because there’s no way these horses are doing what they do normally. This is how the sausage is made.
“I understand how bad it has gotten and how much people get away with, and they get away with it because people don’t understand horsemanship or horse language.
“The biggest weakness in terms of solving this problem is we have too many people who lack horsemanship to understand that these are not normal things.”
While many people presume Susan has made a career out of vilifying the world’s top riders, she says she makes perhaps $1,000 a year from Dressage Hub. This is not the way she earns her money or pays her bills, but it is her way of correcting at least some of the wrongs in the world.
And she is no longer a lone voice screaming into the darkness. While the likes of Epona.tv have also taken the masters to task over the years, there are a growing number of social media platforms demanding change in equestrian sports and in our relationship with horses.
However, it would be wrong to suggest there is a growing campaign to end equestrian sports. That is not the end goal, at least not for Susan.
“I would like to start an organisation for people who like their horses and want to compete,” she says. “That’s my next step.
“I think dressage is going to split into two eventually; into the people who want to do competitive modern dressage and beat on horses, and the rest of us who actually like our horses.
“It’s time to start an organisation that allows people to ride without bridles or in a snaffle or without spurs. We need a place to compete with those freedoms, a place with community that isn’t so competitive and toxic.”
