If you like to keep up with equestrian competitions, you’ve been born into a great time. It has never been easier to stay connected to your favorite atheletes and disciplines. There are plenty of good ways to go about it, but I am going to briefly explain why twitter has become my favroite way to keep up with the equestrian action nationally, and internationally.

Finding results and watching live events is part of my job, but I need to discover new sources all the time. Of all the avenues of discovery that I have at my disposal, I hfind that my witter account is been the mostly useful.

Sometimes I get a tip from a friend or co-worker, or an event website will lead me to a scoreboard somewhere (though event websites are as often unreliable as otherwise), but as a general rule “live scoring” from any big event is slower than the nearly instant updates from the twitterverse. Search up the hashtag #barburycastle for a good example of twitter expediency  (to anyone that doesn’t have a twitter account I apologize for using site-specific lingo). While in the office Saturday I used that hashtag to keep up with the CIC3*. For that reason I was scrolling through my twitter feed a little more than usual...though my "usual" is still fairly often.

I can’t remember who “tweeted” about it, but while looking through barbury tweets I came across the link to www.clipmyhorse.de/en. This link allowed me watch equestrian vaulting live from CHIO Aachen all morning. I know about vaulting but, as I wrote last week, I’m new to this game so this little webcast (it was not the quality of a USEF Network of FEI TV live stream) was my first opportunity to watch vaulters in action.

I already had the Global Champions Tour CSI5* jumping event from Monaco on the office google TV ( If you’re a jumping fan and you don’t follow GCT events I recommend that you start right away. You can watch them live at www.globalchampionstour.com), and I spent a few hours in the afternoon at the CAA Carriage Festival here at the Kentucky Horse Park, so the vaulting only made a good day a little better, but the point is that through twitter I found something I otherwise might not have discovered for a while, or at all, and not before that competition had ended.

In this age of connectivity being a fan of international competition, and staying abreast of it, has never been easier. Sometime soon I’ll make a list of twitter accounts I recommend, and the best places to watch live national and international competition to try and make navigating the options a little bit easier. Equestrian Weekly is not going anywhere either, so it will remain a good way to catch up on what you’ve missed.

However, if you want to be as in-touch with the sport as you can be…I recommend opening a twitter account and exploring for yourself.

Andrew Minnick is the Editor of Equestrian Weekly and E-Communications Manager at USEF. You can reach him by email at [email protected] or on twitter by following @ahminnick.

The opinions stated in this blog do not reflect the opinions of the USEF. Good or bad, they are Andrew Minnick's thoughts and reflections.