Wellington, Fla.—Jan. 26
Paralympic medalist Kate Shoemaker is committed to dispelling the notion that being a para-athlete means, “I can’t.” In fact, she said, it’s the complete opposite. It actually means, “I can.”
“The biggest question to me is like, ‘Can you do able-bodied? Can you do CDIs?’ ” she said. “Yes. Nothing about para limits you. All the same doors are available. Thankfully, there’s no discrimination due to having a disability. And I think that’s what people need to see, that it’s actually opening more doors.”
Shoemaker is determined to demonstrate just how much she can do with Vianne, the mare with whom she won individual bronze at the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games, setting her sights on competing at Grand Prix this year. It’s a goal she’s been working toward for a decade, and a goal she thinks she can achieve with the talented gray mare. The pair are well on their way, having competed in the Prix St. Georges both in Germany and the U.S. and earning a pair of wins.
Shoemaker first paired with the 9-year-old Hanoverian (Kastel’s Vitalis—Rauerif, Ramiro’s Bube) bred by Catherine Haddad Staller last winter with the goal of qualifying for Paris, where they finished fifth in the Grade IV individual round before winning the bronze medal in the freestyle.

This weekend the pair competed in the CPEDI3* at the Adequan Global Dressage Festival in Wellington, Florida, where they were the overall champions for the show, a first for Shoemaker. While she’s earned the title abroad, this was the first time winning that honor in the United States.
“It feels like a bit of redemption from Paris, that didn’t go exactly how we wanted,” she said. “Paris was good, but we obviously had very high ambitions, and one oopsie [Vianne spooked during her individual test in Paris] that I think was caused by a bee sting.”
Though it was a weekend of competitive success, it was also an emotionally taxing week for Shoemaker. She lost her 2022 World Championship freestyle silver-medal winning partner Quiana after the mare broke her hip. To honor Quiana, she rode the mare’s freestyle, a custom composition put together by Tom Hunt that was inspired by the soundtrack from “Hook,” aboard Vianne with the goal of scoring 80%.
“The music’s always going to have a special place in my heart,” she said. “It was my first 80. And my second and the next one. We won the silver medal at the World Championships with it, so it means a lot to me.”
Her 80.24% in Sunday’s freestyle was a personal best with Vianne.
“I think it was the best canter extensions I’ve ever ridden on Vianne,” she said. “Because they were Quiana’s highlight in that test, and I just rode it the same way, and she gave it, and it felt so good.
“It was special out there today,” she added, “both for the partnership that I have with Vianne, and the honor I could give to Quiana at the same time.”
We caught up with Shoemaker in Wellington, to discuss her weekend, her Grand Prix aspirations and what’s next for her.
You were able to buy Vianne in December. How did that come about, and what’s it like to be able to maintain that partnership with her?
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I am incredibly honored to have Vianne, to have the opportunity, and I love her to pieces. She just gives so much heart. She was always good to me, but this fall, it’s like we became one, and it feels like she will do anything for me, and it’s just an incredible feeling.
[Buying her] was something that we had talked about beforehand as an option. And I was like, “What happens if I fall in love?”
I love Vianne to pieces, and it’s an honor to be able to be her rider. … Now she gets to stay with me for the rest of her life; I get to honor her for the rest of her days, it makes me feel so good.

Without a major championship this year, what are your goals?
I’m going to focus actually a little bit more on the able-bodied this year, which is kind of a tradition for us in the off year. We’re just going to see if we can secure the Grand Prix movements a bit and give that a go. So that’s the big goal for this year.
I’ve had the goal of doing the Grand Prix for more than 10 years, and to be honest, I’ve always prioritized the para so much that we get almost there, and then it’s like, “No, you’ve got to go do this.” So we’re going to make it a priority this year that, yes, she can still do the para, but we’re going to go down centerline in the Grand Prix, I really hope.
Before the CPEDI you were able to school some of the Grand Prix movements during the Adequan/USDF FEI-Level Trainers Conference with the German dressage team coach Monica Theodorescu.
The pieces are all there. They’re green. It’s a green Grand Prix horse right now, so we need to spend a little more time making it secure. But for me, I just wanted to be all about the harmony and the partnership, and show that even as a para rider with the right training, the horses will do anything for us. That’s the whole point of dressage, the harmony and the grace and the partnership.
I saw that you’ve done some Prix St. Georges with her with some really strong scores. You won a class at White Fences Polar Express (Florida) on a 74.06%.

We entered our first S class in Germany, and she won the whole thing out of 34 starters, which was just like, wow. And then so that qualified us for the Prix St. Georges final, which we had not entered. They let us put an entry [in] because we were now qualified, and she ended up in second by just a smidge. But I was still, like, “Wow.” We weren’t even schooling for that class, and so that was amazing.
Then she came home, got out of quarantine the first of December, and that week went straight into her first show here at White Fences, where she won a fairly large class of Prix St. Georges. I had to go at the end of the class, so I was like, well, whatever we get, it will be real. But she just felt incredible.
Honestly, before Paris, we weren’t working on, really, any of the able-bodied movements, because we were so afraid that we would mess something up, and that we would make mistakes. And then, she got a little bit of a break after Paris, and we went back to work, and I said, “OK, let’s do this. Let’s spend our time training in the FEI work.” And after about a week, my trainer and I were both like, “Yeah, we probably should have done some of this before Paris,” because she just blossomed. She was having so much fun with it, you know?
She had started last winter, starting to learn passage, and then I spent nine months saying, “Don’t passage.” And she kept thinking, “Now, now, now?” So when we finally said, “This is passage,” [she went], “Ah, OK, I understand what you want now.” It has actually made it easier; it’s actually improved our harmony.
She’s turning 9 in June, so she’s done a lot for her young years, but she’s like a wise old soul. I was really impressed with her. On Week 1 [of AGDF] we came in—she’d never been in the stadium before—and we were just doing a para demo during the freestyles during the Friday Night Stars. That means we didn’t get to go in the arena at all [beforehand], like not even a hand walk.
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She went in there, and was like, “Hello everyone. It’s great to see you.” I was just like, “Thank you, Vianne.” But that’s just how she is. She just is so at peace with the world, and I feel like it’s my job as her rider, to protect that bubble and keep it that way, because right now she has complete trust.”
What are your plans for this year?
The plan was to focus Vianne on the Grand Prix this year, and then Quiana was going to focus on the para. A national championship has eluded me up to this point, so my goal was to take Quiana to [the U.S. Dressage Festival of Champions (Illinois)] and put our hand in the hat, hoping that we could have a good result there. So right now, everything’s a little bit [uncertain] as far as my plans go, and I’m just going to give myself a little bit of time and kind of regroup and see.
I have young horses in the stable, you know, and Colijn, who Helen Claire [Merrill McNulty] was riding this week [in the Grade V] and did a fantastic job with. I’ve been riding him kind of as a Grand Prix schoolmaster. He’s such a good boy, and he just lets me work on me.
I’m really lucky to be able to continue to ride him and let me work on myself while I ride him. So then I can take that to Vianne, because it’s the little things and the weight aids and just trying to create a lot of muscle memory. Some of my previous horses that I was working toward the Grand Prix with, they were all self-trained, so my aids, they were working, but they maybe weren’t the most correct.
The past few years, I’ve been really trying to hone in on doing it correctly. And, you know, I feel such a big responsibility with Vianne that I need to do it right, so if anything, that holds me back a little bit because I’m like, “Nope, I can’t do that. I’ve to wait until I can do it really well.” But so far, it’s paying off. I just have to be careful I don’t go too slow, because that’s my tendency that I’ve seen in myself over the years.

Can you speak a little to your week at the CPEDI?
I felt like it was important to be here to represent, especially because my teammates [Becca Hart and Fiona Howard] who are being honored at the USEF awards couldn’t be here, so I felt like it was important to represent the team and also support the CPEDI. And in hindsight, it’s actually really given me the opportunity to get in the ring and work on me riding during the test. What I’m really good at is riding a really accurate test, and I really get into this tunnel focus, and I can repeat it over and over and over again, but sometimes then it loses that little bit of fluency and almost the joy of it.
This week, my goal is to just go ride even if it’s not perfect, and there were a couple of moments in my [Grand Prix B] test where I’m like, I could have been a half a meter further over, but the quality was better. If I can start finding that feel in the arena, and then put the accuracy with it, then it’ll be really, really good. So that’s kind of what we were working on this.
The para-dressage team has had a lot of momentum: team bronze in Tokyo 2021, team bronze at the 2022 FEI World Championships (Denmark) and team gold in Paris. Do things feel different this year?
Every single one of us want to bring home gold in LA. And now that the team is golden, we have a huge target on our backs. Honestly, it was there all year long, because we were in Europe and our team was winning everything. I think we may have even had a world record score in there, in addition to the Paralympic record that we set in Paris for a team score. So, yeah, absolutely keep the momentum going, but [we are] also well aware that there’s a target on our back now, but that’s OK because we’ve been the ones chasing for so long, and it feels good to sit in the other seat for once.
For me personally, I didn’t get my gold in Paris, so I think it has motivated me so much. We’ve been in the show arena, how many times since Paris? We are going. We are not slowing down. We are working harder than ever, because I want it badly, but at the end of the day, it’s about the horses, so that’s what’s really important.