Did you ever hear about dressage? Some call it horse ballet. Others refer to it as dancing with your horse. It is an Olympic sport.

Suzanne Ament, a professor of history at Radford University in Virginia, made her own history outside the classroom earlier this year as the winner of the Spring Fling Schooling Dressage Show at the Lloyd Harbor Equestrian Center here on Long Island. Suzanne is blind. She said that similar to the relationship with a Seeing Eye dog, comradery with a horse has provided her with confidence. She also said that the riding experience, including the show, has been filled with fun.

The professor entered the Long Island competition to raise awareness for visually impaired riding and for para-dressage, in which the sport is adapted for riders with disabilities. Suzanne firmly believes that her disability doesn’t place her in the vulnerable situation to fall from a horse. But she and other horse lovers who are visually impaired encounter obstacles not known to other riders. Stables often don’t wish to accommodate riders who aren’t sighted. This possibly might be an insurance issue but also many stable owners and wranglers aren’t equipped or trained to engage people with compromised vision.

The professor of Russian and world history currently is with her fourth Seeing Eye dog. Suzanne has relied on a service dog since 1986. Long before that, when Suzanne was in third grade, she became interested in horses but that passion waned as she pursued her education and began losing her sight. When Suzanne married 10 years ago, she and her husband wanted to share an enjoyable activity. She suggested tandem bicycle riding. He wasn’t interested but they did try horse riding. From that experience, Suzanne gradually returned to serious riding and then to dressage.

The couple now own two horses, Zippy and Hank, and Suzanne enjoys her time in the barn to feed, groom and clean the horses. She finds it relaxing. Comparing the care with that of her dog, Suzanne said it’s similar but just a lot bigger.