Alison O’Dwyer has been in this spot three times before—winning the championship in the dressage division at the Retired Racehorse Project’s Thoroughbred Makeover, and then holding her breath to see which of the 10 division winners will be named the Makeover Champion.

At this year’s competition, held Oct. 11-14 at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Kentucky, it was finally her horse’s name that was called as the overall winner. Knockemdown, a plain bay, 15.2-hand, unraced son of Triple Crown winner American Pharoah, “Dario” sparkled in the dressage arena, showing skill well beyond his 4 years of age.

Watch their winning ride, courtesy of the Retired Racehorse Project:

The Thoroughbred Makeover features recently retired racehorses (or, as in Knockemdown’s case, horses that trained to race but never made it to the starting gate) competing in barrel racing, competitive trail, dressage, eventing, field hunters, polo, ranch work, show hunters, show jumpers and the anything-goes freestyle division. The top five horses in each division qualify to compete in the finale for their specialty’s championship. The judges from all 10 disciplines are then asked to rank the 10 winners based on their training foundation, their keenness to do the job and their future potential in that discipline. The panel’s top choice becomes the Makeover champion and takes home a $10,000 check from Thoroughbred Charities of America.

In the Makeover dressage competition, riders first perform USEF training level, test 2, and then do a 5-minute demonstration ride in front of a different judge to show off their horse by performing whatever movements they choose. Those who qualify for the finale do another demo ride, but this time to music.

O’Dwyer’s finale ride featured shoulder-in, counter-canter and half-pass, which she was apprehensive about including at first—she’d never done it with a previous Makeover mount.

“I feel like he’s really at max capacity for training, as far as what his brain and his body is capable of doing. The work I did do on him is still very difficult for him, especially the lateral work,” said O’Dwyer, who teaches and trains client horses out of Ironmills Farm in Wellington, Florida. ”I always teach them leg yield and shoulder-in and stuff first. I was starting to teach haunches-in because I was thinking that that would help our leg yield. And then one day at the walk, I was just like ‘I wonder if we have a half-pass?’ He just did it and I was like, ‘Oh, apparently we have a half-pass!’ But I went through all the steps before that, and all the learning. He had all the blocks to do it because of the work I had done on the more basic lateral movements before.“

O’Dwyer showed the movement to a Grand Prix dressage trainer she works with in Florida, before leaving for Kentucky. “She’s like, ‘You’re doing it and it’s a pretty hard maneuver. So if you can do it, you might as well show it,’ “ O’Dwyer recalled. “I rode it for [dressage professional] Reese [Koffler-Stanfield] in Kentucky the week before the Makeover too. And I was like, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t want to show it if it’s not good enough!’ So there was a lot of stress and a lot of discussion before really deciding the demo. We knew what the strengths were, and then we knew where some of the weaknesses were, but we were trying to be brave and kind of go for it.”

The Makeover’s inclusion of the demo ride makes it more fun and challenging, O’Dwyer said.

“If it was all just training level, test 2 and 3, I wonder if I would do as well, honestly, because you can only make a 20-meter trot circle so good, you know? At that point, it’s kind of like who has the biggest, flashiest horse. When you add in the demo, it gives your more average ducks a chance to shine if they’re trained.”

And as far as finally winning the overall title?

“Oh, it was the best!” O’Dwyer said. “I honestly really didn’t have the expectation [of winning]. I wanted him to win, but the first two times I’ve been in there and I didn’t get it. I was extremely disappointed.”

At those previous Makeovers, though, the overall champion was selected American Idol-style, via text voting by the audience. “To me, it feels a lot more fair that they have the judges judge,” O’Dwyer said. “I really like that they do it that way now. And to me that feels like such a huge compliment. I love the idea that a judge of something other than dressage appreciated my horse.”

This Makeover was particularly special for O’Dwyer, who used to live in Lexington, because she had a huge contingent of family and friends there to cheer her on. And because her husband, race horse trainer Jerry O’Dwyer, was tending to his own string in Florida, she was on her own with their 3-year-old daughter Adelaide.

“My parents were there. My mom was babysitting every morning the whole week before when I was taking the lessons with Reese,” Alison said.

She also had grooming help from friend Helen Casteel, who helped her get Dario and her other mount Ratajkowski to the ring. “I’ve been able to thank the owners and the connections I got these horses from, but I wouldn’t have been able to survive this horse show if it wasn’t for my cheering crowd. Dario was the last to go [in the preliminary round] and I had the biggest crowd of people watching. Friends and family, and even friends from Lexington I haven’t seen in ages—it felt so good that they were all to watch him. That was just special.”