Extreme Horse Sports: Mounted archery

Our post about vaulting from earlier in the week got me thinking about other extreme equestrian sports. Did you know mounted archery is becoming more known as a sport around the world?

Top photo: mountedarchery.org

Mounted archery got its start as a standardized discipline in Hungary about 30 years ago. Kassai Lajos, the founder of the sport in Hungary, came to the U.S. in 1998 to hold a demonstration. By 2005, interested had grown enough to support the forming of the Mounted Archery Association of the America.

Mountain archery training centers now exist in Florida, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington, as well as Canada and Brazil. A national competition in Texas last year drew 33 competitors, which is pretty impressive for a grassroots sport. Visit www.mountedarchery.org to learn more about this growing sport.

To give you an idea of what mounted archery looks like in a competition setting, here’s some footage from the 2010 USA International Horseback Archery Challenge. The amount of training this sport takes for both horse and rider is intense! Would you ever try mounted archery?