Hell yeah there athletes a few reasons why:1. They train, breed and raise the horses from scratch.2. The riders have trained for years, if you don't move with the horses motion or sit wrong or twist your wrist at the wrong time your going to seriously hurt the horse (that's hard to explain to someone who's never ridden)3. Look up the calories for cantering on a horse, walking a horse is fuck all, that's why we started using horses.4. Horse riding is very broad as a sport. What particular part are you talking about?5. Horse Riders are great in the sack ;)I used to ride horses quite a lot, dated girls who own them and my sister has one too. This doesn't make me biased though. My sisters horse cost me a lot of damn cool shit when I was younger. There so fkn expensive.But yer there athletes, they train like every other sport. There's a lot more to riding a horse if you don't know what your looking at.