PrintAre you excited about the upcoming World Dressage Masters in West Palm Beach? Totilas won’t be there, but one of the newest dressage superstars will: British phenom Charlotte Dujardin. Carl Hester will be riding as well, although not on his most famous mount, stallion Uthopia. Did you ever wonder how the British dressage team went from being the redheaded stepchild of equestrian disciplines in Great Britain to winning team gold at the FEI European Championships over perennial powerhouses Germany and the Netherlands?
If you were going by historic results, eventing would be the discipline most likely to deliver team gold for Great Britain at the 2012 London Olympic Games.
But in the space of just one Olympiad, British dressage has rocketed from poor relation to world super power. In 2009, Britain broke the 50-year German-Dutch stranglehold with team silver at the Alltech FEI European Dressage Championships and repeated the feat at the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games (Ky.).
Then, at the FEI European Dressage Championships held in August this year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Carl Hester, Charlotte Dujardin, Laura Bechtolsheimer and Emile Faurie captured a historic first European team gold by such a margin that they could have substituted Faurie’s “discard” score for Hester’s top score and still won.
Great Britain has produced stand-out riders in earlier generations: In 1978 Jennie Loriston-Clarke won world individual bronze; in 1984 Christopher Bartle finished sixth in the individual competition at the Los Angeles Olympic Games; in 1988 David Hunt became the only British rider to win the three key tests at the Rotterdam CHIO (the Netherlands); and in 1993 Faurie won individual European bronze (Slovenia).
But these were false dawns, and as a team, Britain straggled along in the bottom half at all but one of the last eight Olympic Games.
So what has finally come together to reverse British fortunes in such dramatic style?
Strength In Numbers
First, there was an indirect benefit from the power struggle between Germany and the Netherlands, which resulted in both countries relying on a single superstar horse to plump up their aggregate score.
Britain is the country with strength in depth. In Rotterdam, Hester (Uthopia), Dujardin (Valegro) and Bechtolsheimer (Mistral Hojris) each scored over 77 percent in the Grand Prix. Along with Faurie (Elmegardens Marquis), who got the fourth slot, four other riders—Richard Davison, Emma Hindle and Fiona Bigwood, all previous team medalists, as well as Henriette Andersen—had shown they could score around 70 percent, making selection more open than ever.
Hunt is now chairman of the International Dressage Trainers Club. “Britain has not always been good in a training situation about knowing which competitions abroad riders should attend,” he said. “Now it is all about getting out there and being part of the European scene, which we could never do when we were relying on just one or two good horses.”
Hester also thinks that any “mental blocks” harbored by continental judges have evaporated. “They don’t automatically think in 6s the minute a Brit enters the arena,” he said. “We now have a reputation, and that counts for a lot at the major continental shows.”
