Eighteen-year-old Mica Zandstra stepped — OK, trotted — around a South Loop park dotted with office workers on their lunch break, a woman watching over a sleeping baby and a kid clinging to a rope swing.
Zandstra held tight to the reins of her black-and-white stuffed horse’s head, which she jiggled up and down so it didn’t look “dead.” She trotted, cantered and even tackled some jumps.
The office workers halted their lunch conversations to watch. The babysitter looked over.
An onlooker might have thought Zandstra was off her rocker. But it wasn’t that kind of a toy horse. She rides a hobby horse — the one with a head and a wooden dowel poking out. She made it herself and used it to take part in the Finish Hobby Horse Championship, a yearly competition that draws hundreds of riders from around the world.
Zandstra, who lives in a South Loop high-rise, is just back from another competition, the first U.S. Hobby Horse Championships, which she and three other girls organized. It was held Aug. 10 in a middle-school gym in Almont, Mich., a five-hour drive from Chicago. About 130 riders — nearly all of them young girls — took part in the one-day event that included competitors from Hawaii, Ontario and, of course, Finland, which is to hobby horse riding what Wimbledon is to tennis.
As Sun-Times reporter Stefano Esposito (left) looks on at Webster Park on the Near South Side, Mica Zandstra, 18, of the South Loop, demonstrates a show jump on her hobby horse Tilly like the maneuver done in hobby horse competitions.
“It’s very, very, very competitive,” Zandstra says of the championships in Finland, where she managed an eighth-place finish last year in show jumping.
Hobby horse organizations have sprung up in France, Germany, Russia, Australia and elsewhere in recent years.
Why, you might wonder, has there been a resurgence of a hobby more familiar to Zandstra’s grandmother’s generation?
Being cooped up during the COVID-19 lockdown with little to do is one reason, parents say. Social media helped, too. Enthusiasts post videos of their riding technique on Instagram and Tiktok, inspiring more to be posted.
It also doesn’t hurt that parents — eager for anything that drags their kids away from a screen — have embraced the hobby.
Richard Hembree, 56, traveled to the U.S. championships with his daughter Sarah Beth, 14, from their home in the Atlanta area. For Hembree, hobby horse riding is something to cherish before his daughter gallops off into adulthood.
“There is a beautiful innocence to it,” Hembree says. “It’s a place where girls can be free to enjoy.”
And girls always seem to have had a thing for horses and books about horses — think “Black Beauty” and “The Black Stallion.”
But it’s hard for that love to flourish if you live in a condo downtown, like Zandstra — though she rides real horses, too, in Algonquin.
In a sense, she brought the stable home, with a room in her family’s condo devoted to all things hobby horse: bridles, show ribbons and more than a dozen hobby horses, most that she made herself, though they also can be found online for prices starting around $150.
“I give them all pedigrees and certificates of authenticity,” Zandstra says of her horses.
A couple of discarded heads lay off to one side.
“They’re getting refreshed,” Zandstra says of the faux equine noggins.
Much like the live horse realm of dressage, hobby horse competitors are judged on style, speed and agility in events that include barrel racing, dressage and show jumping.
Hobby horse jump equipment can cost very little, just a few dollars, if you make your own hurdles. Or you could spend about $800 for a custom set that, holding the reins of your hobby horse, you’ll jump over.
Mica Zandstra’s home hobby horse stable is filled with hobby horses she created or bought, ribbons from competitions and accessories for her horses.
And just what does competitive hobby horse riding require of the rider? Athleticism for those jumps, a good imagination and the courage to ignore people who think what you’re doing is silly, riders say.
Verona Lorenz, 11, of Palos Park, hurdled a 4-foot-4-inch jump, winning the Puissance competition in Michigan. She pays no heed to naysayers “because I’m too good for them.”
Kristin Zandstra, Mica’s mother, says: “What’s wrong with using imagination for as long as you can? Wouldn’t we all like to be using our imagination more? What should we be encouraging our teenage girls to do more than this? Should they be playing ‘Call of Duty?’ ”
If you’re now picturing a scene from a comedy sketch, you’ve got hobby horse riding wrong. It’s a little like riding an actual horse, Mica Zandstra says — except that it’s two-legged, not four.
“We’re not real horses,” she says. “We know we’re humans.”
People who ride real horses don’t have a problem with the softer, squishy kind, according to the United States Dressage Federation’s Ross Creech, who says: “While USDF has no involvement in this emerging activity, it seems to be increasingly popular and positively impacting awareness and interest in both dressage and equestrian sport, which USDF certainly supports.”
Sun-Times reporter Stefano Esposito tries his hand at jumping a hurdle with a hobby horse.
In the Finnish championships, point penalties can be levied for everything from trotting instead of cantering to having your hobby horse’s head come off the stick. And riders can be disqualified for “unsportsmanlike behavior, such as throwing a hobby horse.”
In Michigan, where Zandstra was one of the event’s eight judges, “Pointed toes was a huge thing,” she says. “Nobody pointed their toes. It doesn’t look elegant if you don’t point your toes.”
About 350 people, including spectators, showed up for the U.S. championships, which took more than a year to plan and ended up in Michigan because that’s where one of the organizers goes to school. Competitors ranged from 6 years old to 25.
Ava Apodaca, 12, of Carmel, Ind., is something of a celebrity in the sport. She arrived at the gym in Michigan to a swarm of autograph-seeking fans. That’s because Ava has about 40,000 subscribers to her YouTube hobby horse channel.
“From the moment we got in the line, she was surrounded by hundreds of little girls who knew her, who knew the names of her hobby horses,” says Amanda Apodaca, her mother.
And when 18-year-old Rosie Mulari of Finland, rock-star cool and waving her country’s flag, took to the gym floor, a hush fell over the crowd, cell phones all angled toward the young woman.
There were even fabric carrots for the horses to, you know, snack on. And one girl pretended her horse had been “spooked” by someone in the crowd.
“I didn’t penalize her for it,” Zandstra says. “I played along with it because I thought it was cute.”
Mica Zandstra, with her hobby horse Tilly, is preparing for the 2025 world championships in Finland.
Now home in Chicago, Zandstra says she’s preparing for the 2025 championships in Finland. How serious is she about this? Every week, she connects on Instagram with a woman in Denmark, a past hobby horse champion, for a 45-minute coaching session.
And will there be another U.S. championship? She won’t commit but says, “We’ve had a lot of people ask.”
Does she consider that, at 18 and starting her senior year in high school, she might be getting a little old for riding a hobby horse? Has she thought about giving it up?
“Maybe eventually,” she says, “but not any time soon.”
Mica Zandstra, 18, jumping a hurdle on her hobby horse, says she has no plans to give up the sport any time soon.