What it means
In Scottsdale there is exactly one horse show, and if someone says “the horse show is this week” in February they mean the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show at WestWorld. The full name shows up on banners and in the Experience Scottsdale calendar; locals clip it to “the horse show” or “the Arabian show,” and people in the breed, who come from forty countries, clip it further to “Scottsdale,” as in “she won at Scottsdale.” A Scottsdale championship is the credential that sets a stallion’s stud fee.
The show runs eleven days in mid-February and brings about 2,400 horses, more than 350 vendors and roughly 300,000 visitors to WestWorld, the city’s equestrian grounds off Pima Road at the Loop 101. It is the largest Arabian show on earth and the oldest signature event on the city’s calendar, older than the Phoenix Open’s move here, older than Barrett-Jackson, older than most of Scottsdale. The event guide covers what to watch; the Association guide covers the club behind it.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Pima Road signs and the horse trailers northbound on the 101 in February, in hotel rates that climb the same week as the golf tournament, in the smell of hay around WestWorld, and in the Western shopping expo that spills out of the barns. It also explains the horse statues around McCormick Ranch, which was a working Arabian ranch before it was a subdivision.
Where the word came from
The name is descriptive and the club made it stick. In August 1952 a handful of breeders met at the Hotel Westward Ho in Phoenix and formed the Arabian Horse Association of Arizona, electing Ed Tweed of Brusally Ranch president. The Wrigleys kept Arabians at the Arizona Biltmore stables, and the first shows were held on the Biltmore grounds; the show counts 1955 as its first year, with about 50 horses from a dozen farms, though the Association’s own history also describes a 1954 competition there and a 1955 exhibition at the Casa Blanca Inn. Whatever the first date, by 1957 it had a purpose-built home: Anne McCormick, of the ranching family whose land became much of central Scottsdale, built a masonry arena with palm trees on her ranch and called it Paradise Park. The McCormicks’ story is why Scottsdale and Arabians are the same sentence.
The Scottsdale in the name was earned the hard way. After Anne McCormick died in 1969 the show spent two years on Kemper Marley’s land at Bell and Tatum, came back to the ranch in 1971, and was evicted for good in March 1978 when Kaiser-Aetna, which had bought the ranch for houses, gave notice; the 1978 show had drawn 790 horses. The club leased about 90 acres of state land on Bell Road, built Paradise Park II and staged its 25th show there in 1979 with 810 horses. In February 1989 it moved to the City of Scottsdale’s new HorseWorld, soon renamed WestWorld, on Bureau of Reclamation flood-control land. The show has been there since, under agreements with the city that now run to 2033.
What it is not
The horse show is not the rodeo. The Parada del Sol rodeo and parade are a different event, run by different people, in the same season, and the two get blended by visitors into a general Western Week. It is also not an open-breed show; everything in the ring is a purebred or Half-Arabian, which is the point.
The fine print
The numbers come from the Association and from Wikipedia’s 2015 figures, and they are big by any standard: about 2,400 horses, more than 1,000 classes, roughly 300,000 visitors over eleven days, more than 350 commercial exhibitors, and an estimated $52 million for the Scottsdale economy as of 2015. The show calls itself the Super Bowl of the Arabian world and the first leg of the breed’s Triple Crown. Gate admission is a modest daily fee; parking at WestWorld is the bigger line item.
The record’s soft spot is the first year. The show’s homepage and the 1979 “25th annual” billing both point to 1955, and this site uses 1955. The Association’s history page complicates it with a 1954 competition at the Biltmore drawing 102 horses from three states. The likeliest reading is that the club counted from the first show it ran as an organized annual event and treated 1954 as a trial, but no source says so, and the gap is noted here rather than resolved.
The show’s hardest years were 1986 to 1989, when the Tax Reform Act of 1986 ended the passive-loss shelters that had pushed Arabian prices into seven figures; registrations collapsed, farms failed and horses went to auction. The show kept running and moved into a city-owned home it could not be evicted from. That history is why the February crowd mixes Gulf royalty with Scottsdale families who have been coming since the ranch years, and why, unlike the Phoenix Open across town, nobody calls it anything but the horse show.