Riding skills are vastly different between being able to ride and riding well.
The riding skills seen in Olympic competitions are quite different from the ones in Inner Mongolia.
Western equestrian competitions emphasize fine control, where the rider can calmly perform specific foot movements and rhythm changes, challenging the rapport with the horse, and the costs for feeding and training these horses are high.
Meanwhile, domestic equestrian competitions, whether in Tibetan areas or Inner Mongolia, require almost no precise control of the horses; they are more about the rider's skills, like picking up khatas, shooting arrows from horseback, doing handstands, and ten-kilometer speed races.
What surprised Lan Yiyi was the details.
Li Younan was riding a regular tourist horse from Inner Mongolia, and after a short period of acclimatization, he could already control the horse with relatively subtle maneuvers... like making the horse walk sideways to the left or right.
