This article is from the archive of our partner .
Republicans continue to insist, against all objective data, that Ann Romney's horse sport isn't weird. They are wrong.
Joe Scarborough included The New York Times' feature on Romney's love of horses in his tirade about the paper's "embarrassing" coverage of the prosperous couple. Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour complained to Politico last month, "The New York Times does a huge exposé that Ann Romney rides horses. Well, so does my wife, and a few million other people. Watch out for equine performers!" Oh, snap.
But Ann Romney does more than just "ride horses." She competes in dressage -- wearing funny fancy clothes while making the horses do dance moves to music. This has nothing to do with cowboys. Romney rides fancy horses so much that her husband wants to "send her to Betty Ford for addiction to horses," so much that the Romneys spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the hobby. This weekend, her horse qualified to the Olympics in dressage. What is dressage? Allow us to explain Ann Romney's horse sport via GIFs.
When you hear someone say she "rides horses," you think of this. This is not dressage.
Neither is this.
This is dressage, an elaborate dance routine in which you can't see the rider using his or her body to direct the horse to do fancy footwork. They wear elaborate outfits: a top hat, tails, white gloves, as you can see in Elsabe Fourie's GIF.