Herning, Denmark—Aug. 10

Charlotte “Lottie” Fry earned her second individual gold medal of the Blue Hors FEI Dressage World Championship in tonight’s Grand Prix freestyle. She and Glamourdale joined the “90 percent club” when they earned a 90.65%, another personal best for the 26-year-old rider. The podium filled in identically to Monday’s Grand Prix Special, with Denmark’s Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour earning silver with Vamos Amigos, and the Netherlands’ Dinja van Liere taking third on Hermes.

Fry, who rides for Great Britain, earned 10s for extended canter, half pass, extended trot and two-tempi changes as well as for their collectives in front of a sold-out crowd. 

Glamourdale and Lottie Fry. Mollie Bailey Photos

“Honestly I’ve never had that feeling before going into the arena: The second you enter, the crowd is going crazy before you started,” Fry said. “It was exciting for Glamourdale to go in there. He knew it was full and needed to show off. It was an insane feeling. He was bouncing to his freestyle, and I just felt like I could sit there and enjoy it.”

Glamourdale performed to music arranged by Joost Peters, with the theme of “best of Britain.” Fry was beyond thrilled with the 11-year-old stallion’s performance and her resulting score.

“I think it’s still sinking in,” she said of breaking the 90% barrier. “I got very, very emotional in the beginning when I found out, and now I’m just kind of in shock, I think. It’s just incredible. I think it’s something you think you can only ever dream of, and now it’s reality.”

Watch their winning freestyle, courtesy of FEI.tv:

Laudrup-Dufour was grinning from ear-to-ear at her horse’s performance, which earned 89.41%.

“I was super happy with ‘Vamos,’ ” she said.

“He’s 10 years old, and he’s my third horse within four years that I took an individual medal with,” she continued. “The press were like, ‘Were you disappointed [to not get gold]?’ Of course you always go for gold, but it’s just an honor to be here with these two girls, and I do really think that they’ll be part of our changing dressage sport.”

Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour and Vamos Amigos.

Dinja van Liere and 10-year-old Hermes scored an 86.90%.

“I was very happy with my test; actually I think it was my best test of all three,” she said. “I had a lot of control, but in the warm-up he was so relaxed and so easy, and then I came in, and I thought the audience was crazy. And OK it was really cool, but I thought maybe he’d get a little bit too excited from it, but he didn’t. He’s really getting better every day, and today I had his full focus.”

Dinja van Liere and Hermes.

Susanne Baarup, the judge at C for the freestyle, pointed out that of 15 freestyles this evening, 13 of them scored at least 80%.

“The quality is extraordinary,” she said.

One of those combinations was U.S. rider Adrienne Lyle on Salvino, who scored 83.70  percent for sixth place. She spent the morning getting mentally prepared for this evening’s competition.

“It’s way past my bedtime,” she said with a laugh. “[Earlier today] I napped. Salvino napped. We came out this morning, and we had a little school. Yesterday he was mostly off. So we had a little school this morning after the jog, and I actually went back to the hotel and just kinda hung out for a few hours and got off my feet. And then I came back out. I was able to watch the first ride, and then I went back and got on.”

Adrienne Lyle and Salvino.

Lyle was very happy with Salvino’s performance in the electric arena.

“I did this freestyle at the [FEI World Cup (Sweden)]  in 2019, and since then we’ve upped the difficulty in a few places,” she said. “We added a piaffe pirouette to highlight some of the stuff he does well and also bump the degree of difficulty up. And we were able to have a clean ride, so that’s always, that’s huge when you have such a high degree of difficulty. You always are kind of flirting with that line of pushing it as far as you can and still making it look organized and elegant.”

Find full individual results from the freestyle here. Want more from the ECCO FEI World Championships? Click here. Check out the Sept. 5 issue of The Chronicle of the Horse magazine for analysis from the competition.