Vanishing Lines: Endangered Riding Traditions and the Communities Fighting to Keep Them Alive
The Riding Collective — Research Study 002
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: What It Means for a Riding Tradition to Be Endangered
We borrow the word "endangered" from ecology, but traditions do not die the way species do. A species goes extinct when the last individual perishes. A riding tradition goes extinct when the chain of transmission breaks — when there is no one left who learned by doing, body to body, in the place where the practice makes sense.
Participant numbers are a poor proxy for this. A tradition can have thousands of nominal practitioners and still be dying, if the knowledge being passed on is a flattened, performative version of itself — stripped of context, terrain, and meaning. Conversely, a tradition can survive with a handful of practitioners, so long as those few hold the full depth of knowledge and have someone to hand it to.
The endangerment of a riding tradition operates on four axes. First, knowledge transmission: are the elders teaching, and are the young learning — not in a classroom, but in the saddle, on the wave, on the track? Second, terrain access: does the community still have physical access to the landscapes where the tradition lives? A horseman without steppe, a surfer without reef access, a musher without frozen trail — these are musicians without instruments. Third, economic viability: can a practitioner sustain a life while practicing? When the economics collapse, the young leave, and the chain breaks. Fourth, cultural recognition: is the tradition seen — by its own society, by funding bodies, by heritage institutions — as something worth preserving? Invisibility kills as surely as poverty.
This study documents nine traditions that are endangered along one or more of these axes. Some are ancient. Some are modern. All of them involve a human being moving through terrain on or with something — a horse, a reed boat, a pair of skis, a motorcycle, a set of roller skates, a dog team. All of them are held together by communities that refuse to let go. And all of them are running out of time, in ways that the mainstream sporting world does not see, because these traditions were never mainstream to begin with.
The Riding Collective's archive already holds entries for many of the disciplines, sacred sites, and legends referenced here. This study is not a replacement for those entries. It is a lens — a way of looking across the archive and asking: which lines are about to vanish?
1. Buzkashi and the Horse Games of Central Asia
In the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan, a chapandaz — a master buzkashi rider — can read the weight of a headless goat carcass from horseback, calculate the angle of forty other riders converging on it, and make a decision with his knees that his hands will execute a half-second later. This knowledge is not written anywhere. It lives in the bodies of men who learned it from their fathers, who learned it from theirs, back through centuries that predate any written account of the game.
Buzkashi — literally "goat pulling" — is the mounted tradition of the Afghan, Tajik, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz steppe. Its origins are contested and ancient, likely emerging from the mounted raiding and herding cultures of Central Asia more than a thousand years ago. The game, in its traditional form (tudabarai), has no fixed field, no time limit, and no formal rules beyond the objective: seize the carcass, carry it clear of the pack, and deliver it to a designated point. The modern form (qarajai) introduced circles and boundaries in the mid-twentieth century, partly under the influence of the Afghan Olympic Committee's attempts to standardize the sport in the 1950s.
The Taliban banned buzkashi during their first period of rule (1996-2001), declaring it immoral. The game resurfaced after the U.S. invasion and experienced a brief resurgence, particularly in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, where wealthy warlords sponsored teams as displays of political power. Whitney Azoy's ethnography Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan (first published 1982, updated 2011) remains the definitive English-language account of this entanglement between sport and politics. Since the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, buzkashi's status has been precarious. The game has not been formally banned again, but the economic collapse, the flight of wealthy sponsors, and the general suppression of public spectacle have gutted the infrastructure. Horses that cost $20,000 to maintain are being sold. Young men who might have become chapandaz are leaving for Pakistan and Iran.
In Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, variants of mounted horse games — kok-boru (Kyrgyz buzkashi), kyz kuumai (the "bride chase"), tenge ilu (coin-picking at a gallop) — fare somewhat better, partly because both governments have invested in them as national identity projects. The World Nomad Games, held in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan in 2014, 2016, 2018, and in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2024, have given these traditions international visibility. But visibility is not transmission. The young riders competing at the World Nomad Games increasingly learn in academies, not from herding families. The pastoral context — the life on horseback that produced the skills in the first place — is thinning as urbanization accelerates across the region.
The chapandaz of Panjshir are not performing a sport. They are practicing a way of being mounted that emerged from terrain and survival. When the last one stops riding, it will not be a game that disappears. It will be a library.
2. Tbourida in Morocco: UNESCO Recognition and the Pressures Behind It
On a packed-earth track outside Meknes, twelve riders in white djellabas charge in a single line, muskets raised, and fire in unison — the crack of black powder splitting the afternoon air exactly once, as if twelve triggers were one trigger. This is tbourida, also called fantasia by the French who colonized Morocco and could not resist renaming what they found. The Moroccans have been doing this since at least the sixteenth century. The name they use is their own.
UNESCO inscribed tbourida on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2021, a recognition that Moroccan cultural advocates had pursued for years. The inscription was a victory, but a complicated one. UNESCO recognition brings visibility, legitimacy, and the possibility of funding. It also brings the pressure to perform — to make a living tradition legible to an international audience, which inevitably means smoothing its edges, standardizing its variations, and presenting it as a spectacle rather than a practice.
Tbourida is, at its root, a mounted military exercise. The coordinated charge and simultaneous volley simulate cavalry warfare. The discipline demands extraordinary horsemanship: the riders (known as a sorba) must maintain a perfect line at full gallop, and the firing must be so synchronized that observers hear a single report. A sorba that produces two distinct sounds has failed. The training for this takes years and requires a specific relationship between rider and horse that cannot be developed in a weekend clinic.
The pressures on tbourida are economic and spatial. The Barb and Arab-Barb horses used in tbourida cost between 30,000 and 100,000 Moroccan dirhams ($3,000-$10,000 USD) to purchase and far more to maintain. Feed, veterinary care, saddlery, the ornate traditional tack — these costs fall on rural families whose income is declining as agriculture mechanizes and young people migrate to Casablanca, Rabat, and Tangier. The moussems — the regional festivals where tbourida is performed — depend on open rural gathering grounds that are increasingly being developed or privatized. A moussem needs space: for horses, for camping, for the long straight track. Suburban sprawl does not accommodate this.
The Moroccan Royal Federation of Equestrian Sports and the Hassan II Foundation have invested in preservation, funding regional competitions and maintaining breeding programs for Barb horses. But the tension between preservation and performance is real. When tbourida becomes a tourist attraction — something to watch at a resort — the knowledge chain subtly shifts. The rider is no longer training to maintain a martial tradition. He is training to be watched. That difference matters.
3. Charreada: Mexico's National Sport at the Margins of Its Own Country
Charreada is the official national sport of Mexico. It has been since 1933, when President Abelardo Rodriguez signed the decree. It is also, by almost every measurable indicator, losing ground in its own country.
The charreada descends from the working practices of the Mexican vaquero — the horseman whose traditions predate and directly influenced the Anglo-American cowboy. The nine suertes (scored events) of a modern charreada — cala de caballo (reining), piales en el lienzo (roping from horseback), colas (bull-tailing), jineteo de toro (bull riding), terna en el ruedo (team roping), manganas a pie and a caballo (forefooting on foot and horseback), paso de la muerte (the death pass, a bareback leap from one galloping horse to another), and the escaramuza charra (the women's precision riding event) — are codified versions of skills that were once daily work on the haciendas of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacan, and Zacatecas.
The Federacion Mexicana de Charreria, founded in 1933, oversees more than 1,200 registered associations (asociaciones de charros) across Mexico and the United States. UNESCO inscribed charreria on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016. The infrastructure exists. The problem is participation.
Mexican urbanization has been relentless. In 1950, 57% of the population was rural. By 2020, that figure was 21%. The ranchos where young charros once learned by working cattle alongside their fathers are disappearing into the outskirts of Guadalajara and Monterrey. Soccer, basketball, and boxing dominate youth athletics. The cost of maintaining a horse in an urban or peri-urban setting prices out all but the wealthy. Charreada, once a working-class tradition rooted in labor, is increasingly perceived as an elite hobby — a perception that accelerates disengagement among the communities that originated it.
The escaramuza charra — the women's event, in which teams of eight riders perform synchronized maneuvers at speed in flowing Adelita dresses — is one of the tradition's brightest spots. Participation has grown steadily, and the escaramuza has become a point of pride and entry for families that might otherwise drift away from the lienzo (the charreada arena). But even here, the economics are brutal. A competitive escaramuza team requires eight trained horses, custom dresses, transport, and entry fees. The families who do this are making sacrifices that the broader culture does not see.
In the United States, the Mexican-American charro community — concentrated in Texas, California, and Illinois — maintains a parallel tradition that serves as both cultural preservation and identity assertion. For Mexican-American families, the charreada is not a sport. It is a declaration: we are still here, and we remember where we came from.
4. Caballitos de Totora: Riding Waves on Reed in Huanchaco, Peru
The fishermen of Huanchaco do not call what they do surfing. They call it working. But they have been riding waves on bundled totora reeds for somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 years, which makes this, by a considerable margin, the oldest continuous wave-riding tradition on earth.
The caballito de totora — "little reed horse" — is a one-person watercraft made from tightly bound stalks of Scirpus californicus, the totora reed that grows in the coastal wetlands (huachaques) around Huanchaco, a fishing village on the northern coast of Peru near the city of Trujillo. The craft is roughly three to four meters long, tapered at bow and stern, and ridden in a kneeling position. The fisherman paddles out through the break, sets nets, catches fish, and then rides the wave back to shore, kneeling on the reed bundle with his catch. Archaeological evidence from the Moche civilization (100-700 CE) — ceramics, friezes at the Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna — depicts exactly this practice.
The caballito is not a museum piece. As of 2026, approximately 40 to 60 fishermen in Huanchaco still build and ride them daily. The knowledge is specific and embodied: selecting the right reeds, harvesting at the correct season, binding the bundle to the correct density and taper, reading the swell to choose the right wave home. Carlos "Huevito" Ucanan, one of the most respected caballito builders in Huanchaco, has said that a well-built caballito can last about a month before the reeds become waterlogged. Then you build another. The craft is not a possession. It is a cycle.
Tourism is Huanchaco's paradox. The town was designated a World Surfing Reserve by the Save The Waves Coalition in 2013, partly on the strength of the caballito tradition. Tourists come to see the fishermen ride. Surf schools have proliferated along the beach. Some fishermen have found supplementary income offering caballito rides to visitors. But tourism also drives real estate development, which threatens the huachaques — the reed beds that are the material foundation of the entire tradition. No reeds, no caballitos. It is that simple.
The Riding Collective's archive notes this as a sacred site entry: a place where terrain, craft, and practice are inseparable, where the loss of any one element — the wetland, the reed, the knowledge of binding, the wave — breaks the chain entirely. The fishermen of Huanchaco are not performing heritage. They are going to work the way their ancestors went to work. The question is whether the wetlands will survive long enough for the next generation to learn.
5. Telemark Skiing: The Discipline That Invented Skiing, Now Fighting for Survival
In 1868, Sondre Norheim of Morgedal, Telemark county, Norway, arrived at a ski competition in Christiania (now Oslo) and demonstrated a turn that no one had seen before. He bent his knees, dropped his inside heel, and carved an arc through the snow using a technique developed in the steep terrain of his home valley. The crowd was astonished. The modern era of skiing began.
Everything that followed — alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, freestyle, ski jumping, the entire global ski industry — descends from what Norheim and his neighbors in Telemark were doing on homemade wooden skis with birch-root bindings in the 1850s and 1860s. The Telemark turn is the original. Every other skiing discipline is a derivative.
And yet Telemark skiing, as a competitive and recreational discipline, is now a niche within a niche. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) recognized Telemark as a discipline and organized a World Cup circuit, but the sport was never included in the Winter Olympics, and FIS dropped its Telemark events from the official calendar in 2023, citing low participation and limited broadcast interest. The Norwegian Ski Federation (Norges Skiforbund) maintains a Telemark committee, and the Telemark Festival in Rjukan draws dedicated practitioners, but the numbers are small and aging.
The irony is almost too precise to be believed. Norway — the country that gave skiing to the world — cannot fill a Telemark starting gate. The disciplines that inherited Telemark's DNA — alpine racing, freestyle moguls, big-mountain freeride — generate billions in revenue and dominate winter sports media. The parent tradition persists in the margins.
What keeps Telemark alive is not institutions. It is practitioners who find something in the form that no other skiing discipline offers. The Telemark turn requires a fundamentally different relationship with the mountain than a locked-heel alpine turn. The free heel — the defining feature — means the skier's body moves through a deeper range of motion, with the rear knee dropping toward the ski in a lunging stance that demands balance, flexibility, and a willingness to be unstable. Telemark skiers describe it as more intimate, more conversational with the terrain. You are not dominating the mountain with edge angle and force. You are negotiating with it.
In Morgedal, the Norheim family homestead is a museum. A few kilometers away, Telemark skiers still practice on the slopes where the discipline was born — terrain that the Collective's archive identifies as one of skiing's foundational sacred sites. The question is whether the practice can survive the loss of its competitive infrastructure, or whether the museum will be all that remains.
6. Sled Dog Racing and the Melting Trail
The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, run annually since 1973 across roughly 1,000 miles of Alaskan terrain from Anchorage to Nome, is the most visible form of a practice that is far older and far more widespread than any single race. Sled dog travel is foundational to the Indigenous cultures of the circumpolar North — Inuit, Yup'ik, Inupiaq, Sami, Chukchi, and others — stretching back at least 4,000 years. The archaeological record from the Thule culture (circa 1000 CE) shows sophisticated sled design and dog breeding programs. For these communities, dog mushing was not sport. It was transport, survival, and relationship.
Climate change is rewriting the map. Arctic temperatures are rising two to four times faster than the global average. Sea ice is retreating. Permafrost is thawing. River ice that once supported heavily loaded dog sleds is now unreliable. The Iditarod itself has been forced to relocate its start multiple times due to insufficient snow — in 2003, 2015, 2016, and 2022, the ceremonial start in Anchorage proceeded but the competitive start was moved north to Fairbanks or Willow. In 2024 and 2025, trail conditions were described by veteran mushers as the most unpredictable in the race's history.
For Indigenous communities, the loss is not abstract. In Nunavut and Greenland, where Inuit hunters still use dog teams for winter travel and hunting, shorter winters and thinner ice mean fewer months of usable trail. A practice that once defined daily life from October through May is compressing into a shrinking window. Young people in these communities see less reason to invest years in learning to drive dogs when snowmobiles are faster and the season is shorter. The knowledge — how to read ice, how to communicate with a lead dog, how to navigate in whiteout conditions by trusting the team — is not transferring at the rate it once did.
Simultaneously, the animal welfare debate has intensified. Organizations like PETA and the Humane Society have campaigned against the Iditarod for decades, citing dog deaths on the trail (44 documented race-related deaths between 1973 and 2023) and the conditions in large commercial kennels. Mushers counter that working sled dogs are among the most carefully bred, conditioned, and cared-for animals on earth, and that the welfare critics fail to distinguish between commercial racing operations and subsistence or cultural mushing. The debate is real and ongoing, but its effect on cultural preservation is tangible: it creates a social environment in which young people are discouraged from entering the practice.
The Sami people of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland used dog teams for reindeer herding before transitioning primarily to snowmobiles in the mid-twentieth century. A small revival movement, centered around traditional Sami sled dog breeds and practices, has emerged in Finnmark and Tromso. It is fragile, underfunded, and depends on a handful of families. But it exists — a thread connecting back to a relationship between human, dog, and frozen terrain that predates every border on the Scandinavian map.
7. Flat Track Motorcycle Racing: The Dirt Ovals Going Dark
Before there was MotoGP, before supercross, before the Isle of Man TT became a pilgrimage, there was flat track. Motorcycles sliding sideways through dirt ovals at 100 miles per hour, inches apart, with no brakes on the rear wheel because brakes would kill you. For most of the twentieth century, flat track — also called dirt track — was the most popular form of motorcycle racing in the United States.
The American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) sanctioned its first Grand National Championship in 1954, but the tradition predates formalization by decades. County fairground horse tracks were repurposed for motorcycle racing as early as the 1910s. By the 1950s and 1960s, flat track was drawing crowds of 10,000 to 20,000 at venues like the Springfield Mile in Illinois, the Sacramento Mile in California, and the Peoria TT in Illinois. Riders like Bart Markel, Dick Mann, Kenny Roberts, and later Scott Parker (with a record 94 Grand National wins between 1980 and 2000) were household names in the motorcycle world.
The decline began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. Road racing and motocross — both more telegenic, both more aligned with manufacturer marketing strategies — siphoned media coverage and sponsorship. The fairgrounds that hosted flat track events were sold for development. Insurance costs rose. The small-town circuits that served as feeder systems for the Grand National Championship — the amateur short tracks in places like Du Quoin, Illinois and Castle Rock, Washington — closed one by one.
In 2017, the AMA rebranded its flat track series as American Flat Track (AFT) and secured a television deal, briefly reviving visibility. Rider Jared Mees won seven Grand National Championships between 2012 and 2024, becoming the discipline's most decorated modern competitor. Indian Motorcycle's factory team brought manufacturer investment back to the sport. But the structural problem remains: the venues are disappearing. A flat track needs a dirt or cushion oval, grandstands, and a community willing to tolerate noise and traffic. These are increasingly hard to find in an America that has paved over its fairgrounds and rezoned its rural outskirts.
What flat track preserves is a specific form of motorcycle knowledge: the art of controlling a slide. No traction control, no anti-lock brakes, no electronic rider aids. Just a steel shoe on the left boot, a throttle, and the feel of the rear tire breaking loose on dirt. Every major motorcycle road racer who came out of America before 2000 — Roberts, Lawson, Rainey, Nicky Hayden — learned to race on dirt ovals. That pipeline is nearly dry. The riders who could teach it are aging out. The ovals are going dark.
8. Roller Derby's Third Wave: Resurrection, Community, and the Question of Sustainability
Roller derby died twice. The first death was in the late 1970s, when the original professional league — founded by Leo Seltzer in 1935, popularized on television in the 1960s and 1970s — collapsed under the weight of its own theatricality. It had become too close to professional wrestling: scripted, spectacular, and unmoored from real athletic competition. The audience moved on. The second death was quieter: the various revival attempts of the 1980s and 1990s that sputtered and failed.
The third wave began in Austin, Texas, in 2001, when a group of women founded what would become the Texas Rollergirls. They built it from nothing — DIY, skater-owned, skater-operated. They wrote the rules. They built the track. They booked the venues. They designed the aesthetic. Within five years, leagues had spread to every major American city and then internationally. The Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), founded in 2004, became the sport's governing body, eventually encompassing over 400 member leagues across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.
What made third-wave derby different was not just the sport itself — full-contact, strategic, genuinely athletic — but the culture around it. Roller derby became one of the most explicitly queer-affirming, body-positive, and feminist sporting communities in the world. Leagues were overwhelmingly women-led and operated. Trans and nonbinary inclusion was codified in WFTDA policy years before most other sports organizations addressed it. The sport attracted people who had been excluded from or alienated by mainstream athletics. For many skaters, derby was the first time they experienced their body as powerful.
The COVID-19 pandemic nearly killed it a third time. Leagues that depended on bout revenue and practice-space rental could not survive two years of shutdown. Between 2020 and 2022, an estimated 30-40% of WFTDA member leagues folded or went dormant. The recovery has been slow and uneven. Some leagues have rebuilt. Others exist only on social media, their skaters scattered, their leases gone.
The structural challenge is the same one that faces every community-run sport: volunteer burnout. Roller derby leagues are operated almost entirely by the skaters themselves — coaching, refereeing, marketing, event production, financial management, and facility negotiation, all done by people who also have full-time jobs and families. The labor is immense and uncompensated. The joy is real, but joy is not an organizational strategy.
Roller derby's third wave proved that a sport can be resurrected by sheer force of community will. The question now is whether that community can build the infrastructure to sustain itself, or whether the fourth death is already underway — not dramatic, not sudden, just a slow leak of volunteers who gave everything they had.
9. Roller Derby, Buzkashi, and the Fisherman's Reed: What Preservation Actually Means
The nine traditions documented in this study span five continents, at least three millennia, and modes of riding that range from a horse at full gallop to a reed boat on a Pacific wave to a motorcycle on a dirt oval. They have almost nothing in common — except that they are all held together by communities who refuse to let go, and they are all threatened by forces larger than any single community can resist.
It would be tempting to conclude with a call to preservation — to urge governments, heritage organizations, and funding bodies to save these traditions. And those things matter. UNESCO inscriptions help. Government funding helps. Media attention helps. The Moroccan Royal Federation's investment in tbourida, the World Nomad Games' platform for kok-boru, WFTDA's organizational infrastructure for roller derby — these are real interventions that make a real difference.
But preservation, in the way it is usually practiced, carries a trap. The impulse to preserve can become the impulse to freeze. To turn a living tradition into a museum exhibit — something to be watched, studied, and admired from behind glass. A tbourida performance staged for tourists is not the same as a tbourida performed at a moussem for the community that has been gathering there for generations. A caballito de totora ride offered to a visitor is not the same as a fisherman riding his catch home through the break at dawn. The form may look identical. The knowledge is not the same.
What these communities are fighting for is not the preservation of a form. It is the preservation of the conditions under which the form can continue to evolve on its own terms. The chapandaz of Panjshir do not need buzkashi to be frozen in its current state. They need peace, horses, and open ground. The fishermen of Huanchaco do not need their caballitos enshrined. They need their wetlands. The Telemark skiers of Morgedal do not need a heritage plaque. They need snow, and slopes, and young people willing to learn the free-heel turn not because it is historic but because it is beautiful.
The Riding Collective's archive exists to hold this knowledge in trust — not to own it, but to make it visible, to connect communities facing similar pressures, and to ensure that when a tradition's practitioners need to make their case for survival, the documentation exists. Our research standards (published alongside this study) are built on the principle that the community is the authority: they decide what is preserved, how it is framed, and who has access. We hold the archive. They hold the stories.
The lines documented here are vanishing. Some will break in our lifetime. But as long as someone is riding — kneeling on a reed boat, lunging through a Telemark turn, firing a musket from horseback at a gallop, sliding sideways through a dirt corner, jamming through a pack on eight wheels — the line holds. The knowledge lives in the body. The body is still moving. That is not nothing. That is everything.
Methodological Note
This study was produced under The Riding Collective's Research Standards (Version 1.0, April 2026). All claims are sourced from published scholarship, verified journalism, and — where available — practitioner testimony. Communities documented in this study will be contacted for review before any material is incorporated into the archive's permanent entries. This document is a living text, subject to community amendment under Section 6.2 of the Research Standards.
Cross-references to existing Riding Collective archive entries: sacred sites (Huanchaco, Morgedal), disciplines (buzkashi, tbourida, charreada, Telemark skiing, sled dog mushing, flat track motorcycle racing, roller derby), legends (to be developed in consultation with relevant communities), timeline (origin dates referenced herein are candidates for formal timeline entries pending source verification).
Dr. Maren Solvik
Chief Researcher, The Riding Collective
Tromsoe / Valparaiso, April 2026