PrintHe reveals the thrills and pitfalls of riding the most famous dressage horse in the world.
When the news hit that Matthias Alexander Rath would be the next rider of Totilas, arguably the world’s greatest dressage horse, everyone had an opinion.
To Totilas fans, he’s one of the luckiest men in the world. To some of the Dutch, he’s disliked simply for riding the stallion that previously called the Netherlands home. To fellow Germans, he represents the hope that the country will soon be at the top of the dressage game again.
But everyone else aside, he’s really just a 27-year-old living a dream.
“I’m really happy every day,” said Rath, who began riding Totilas in October of 2010. “It’s such joy to work with this horse. It’s just an amazing feeling every single day.
It was a big honor and it was a really big chance in my life.”
As eudaemonic as it was for Rath to get the ride on the 11-year-old Dutch Warmblood stallion (Gribaldi—Lominka, Glendale), the partnership also produces a level of pressure many riders will never know.
“Of course I am very happy to ride the world’s best dressage horse from now on, but it is a big challenge to fill [Edward Gal’s] footsteps,” he wrote on his website, www.matthias-rath.de, when it was first announced that he would ride Totilas.
Even by writing that, he was probably underestimating just what it would mean to succeed Gal, because the addition of Totilas to his stable launched Rath to celebrity status, complete with the loss of privacy and other pitfalls of fame.
Life Before Totilas
Rath saw plenty of his own accomplishments long before Totilas. As the son of Klaus-Martin Rath, a dressage trainer and member of the German Olympic Committee, and Melita Huck, an equestrian photographer, Matthias has been surrounded by horses his entire life. His uncle, Karsten Huck, is a bronze-medal winner in show jumping at the 1988 Olympic Games. His stepmother, Ann Kathrin Linsenhoff, is a European and Olympic champion.
“I never wished to do anything else,” said Matthias, who used to play soccer but never seriously. “I like everything about sports. When I open the newspaper, I always look first at the sports pages to see what’s going on. But [dressage], it was the thing I always wanted to do.”
He got his first pony, Susi, as a Christmas gift when he was 5. As a young rider, he was a member of the German team that won the 2005 European Championship. His first years riding Grand Prix were in the saddle of Linsenhoff’s former World Equestrian Games partner, Renoir-UNICEF, whom Matthias calls “a patient yet demanding teacher.”
But as many lessons as he’s learned from horses, and though he’s trained with the likes of Klaus Balkenhol and Hans Riegler, the head trainer at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Austria, Matthias says he learns the most from his father.
“He develops horses, I think, in a perfect way. I always want to be as good as he is,” said Matthias. “I hope one day I’ll have the same experience, and I can be as good as he is.”
Matthias has three brothers—Henrik, Niklas and Moritz—and a sister, Marie, but he’s the only one of the siblings who chose horses as a profession, though Marie is getting a start with ponies. Having horses in common with his father adds another element to their relationship.
