Zoie Noelle Brogdon (aka ZoZo Noelle) doesn’t talk about the Olympics the way people expect her to. When the question comes up, she doesn’t lean forward or lower her voice. She laughs, shrugs slightly, and reframes it. Not because the dream feels out of reach, but because it’s not immediate. “I tend to give myself very short-term goals,” she said. “If I start to get too big picture, I get really overwhelmed.”
At 20, Brogdon already carries the résumé of an athlete decades into her career: national titles, historic firsts, global campaigns, and multiple Beyoncé projects (yes… that Beyoncé) among them.
Yet she moves through the world with the ease of someone who knows she doesn’t have to fit into a box or collapse herself into a single future to be taken seriously.
Brogdon competes in “hunter/jumper,” an English riding discipline built around precision, rhythm, and partnership with her horse. Riders guide their horses through a course of carefully spaced jumps, where success depends not just on speed or strength, but on timing, restraint and trust. Each round is a series of quiet decisions made at full motion — when to press forward, when to hold back, when to let the horse lead.
That balance mirrors how Brogdon approaches her own life.
She first found horses almost by accident. Her mother, Tracy, enrolled her in a summer camp near her job in Burbank, hoping to channel Brogdon’s restless energy. After the first day, the trainer pulled her mother aside with a warning. “She really likes this,” the trainer said. “You’re in trouble because this sport is expensive.”
From there, Brogdon’s family found the Compton Cowboys and the Compton Junior Equestrians (CJE) program, where she began riding consistently. The moment it clicked for Brogdon actually had nothing to do with competition. “The first time I really felt like this was my thing was cantering bareback in the mountains,” she recalled. “That stereotypical movie moment — hair floating in the wind. I felt free.” Granted, Brogdon was quick to note she was wearing a helmet — so the wind-blown movie moment was more imagined than literal — but the feeling was real. In that instant, she felt deeply connected to her horse.
That connection, she explained, is difficult to translate to people who don’t ride. “It just feels like love,” Brogdon said. “A very special type of love. You don’t talk to this being, but you just know you enjoy it and they enjoy it. You’re just sharing this moment together.”
That philosophy — presence over performance — was visible earlier this month at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, where Brogdon joined Olympian Jessica Springsteen (yes, daughter of “The Boss”) and nearly two dozen riders for the annual fundraising clinic hosted by West Palms Events, the Michael Nyuis Foundation, along with the Compton Cowboys and CJE. Now in its third year, the clinic has grown into a cultural gathering of mentorship, visibility, and legacy intersecting in real time.
Randy Savvy, CEO and co-founder of the Compton Cowboyssees Brogdon as the clearest example of what happens when access meets patience. “She’s what the work is for,” he said. “Not rushing outcomes. Building people.”
Savvy grew up riding, never imagining he’d one day be tasked with sustaining an entire ecosystem. As cultural attention and partnerships elevated the Compton Cowboys into the spotlight, he leaned in — choosing not to depend on donations and fees alone, but to turn that brand visibility into sustainability. “This isn’t about one rider,” he said. “It’s about creating a model where kids don’t have to fight just to enter the space.”
That infrastructure matters in a sport historically associated with wealth and exclusion. Horses are expensive. Training is time-intensive. The culture can be unwelcoming. For many families, equestrianism feels out of reach before it even feels aspirational.
Brogdon understands that distance and the responsibility people sometimes try to attach to it. Asked whether she feels pressure as one of the few Black women in elite equestrian spaces, she is refreshingly direct. “Thankfully, I’m a very selfish person,” she said with a smile. “I don’t really allow a lot of external pressure to get on me. At the end of the day, I’m doing this for fun and I’m doing it for me.”
That mindset carries into her life at UCLA, where Brogdon is a junior majoring in African American Studies with a Film and Television minor. She became the first Black rider on the school’s equestrian team, though she rarely leads with that fact. “I don’t really tell people what I do,” she admitted. “It’s more of my escape than my everything.”
When classmates eventually find out — often through social media — the response is supportive, if curious. Brogdon doesn’t mind being an entry point. “I like being able to kind of be an introduction to people,” she said. “Even if they don’t fully understand it.”
That separation also gives Brogdon room to experiment without attaching a consequence to the outcome. Recently, that experimentation has taken an unexpected turn: stand-up comedy.
“My roommate and I are starting to build a little comedy set,” she said, laughing. The plan, for now, is to perform a short performance in front of friends on campus, but the curiosity behind it is real. “If it goes really well and we like it, we’ll go to an actual show and try it. We’re terrified,” she added, “but we kind of want to do it just to say we did.”
The idea isn’t rooted in career ambition so much as confidence, and Zoie has confidence to spare and the belief that trying something new doesn’t have to come with pressure attached. Brogdon talked about comedy the same way she talked about riding trails or making art: as another space to explore her whole self.
It’s a telling detail. Whether she’s clearing jumps, collaborating on global stages, or stepping into a spotlight with nothing but a microphone and a friend, Brogdon approaches each pursuit with the same ease. Curiosity over fear. Joy over outcome.
That openness feels distinctly generational. Brogdon belongs to a unique group of Gen Z creatives and athletes who aren’t racing toward singular definitions of success. They’ve grown up to some degree with representation as a given, but still deal with sustainability as a question. Simultaneously, they’re building lives big enough to hold contradiction, discipline and play, ambition and rest.
Asked what advice she would give anyone chasing their passions, Brogdon doesn’t hesitate. “Do whatever you want to do,” she said. “It’s your life. You’re the only one living it.”
It’s a simple philosophy, but a durable one — as useful in the saddle as it is everywhere else. In hunter/jumper, obstacles don’t disappear. They’re approached, read carefully, and met with intention. Sometimes they’re cleared. Sometimes they’re not. And as anyone watching the clinic could see, you always get the chance to circle back and try again.
For Zoie Brogdon, the future isn’t a hurdle to clear — it’s a course, taken at her own pace, one measured stride at a time.
