Category: Dressage Update

Out and About visited Felbridge, East Grinstead, West Sussex, when it held its first affiliated British Dressage competition on Friday, 24 July. The images show riders yet to put the venue into their show diary what the centre has to offer.

DON’T MISS the Equine America-sponsored Rotterdam-Hickstead Grand Prix Challenge which can viewed free of charge this weekend, 18-19 July, via a dedicated page on the website Dressage at Hickstead. It is also being broadcast this weekend on Horse & Country TV from 6pm.

Amy Stovold first hit the headlines winning the Medium Southern Regional Championships riding show-stopper stallion Lenski at Oldencraig in 2004. Lenski was certainly a learning curve, but the horse that got her onto BD’s World Class Development Programme and to the London International Horse Show at Olympia was MacBrian.

“A little horse for my mum to have some fun with”, chosen from a video sent over from Denmark, was the beginning of an epic journey to an Aachen CHIO. That was where Claire Knowles rode a fire-breathing Pendragon of Independence.

“I would probably say Jazz was the horse that made me,” says Sarah Williams. “She taught me the fundamental importance of riding a horse connected because if I could then get her supple and working through the body, I could train her.”

Trainer and List 1 judge Sara-Jane Lanning has achieved around 25 regional and six national titles with various horses in various competitions including freestyles, small tour championships and combined training.

Mojca Usnik, who rides for her homeland of Slovenia, has worked as a coach at Wimbledon Village Stables for the past seven years. It was a landmark in her career when she rode nine-year-old Libertino at the London International Horse Show 2019.

International dressage rider and trainer, Dan Watson: “I’d say to myself, he’s not taking the bit — how can I get what I’m trying to achieve? Some days I’d be on him an hour and a half, just walking, trying to achieve some kind of feeling of connection.”

“IT HAS TO BE Highland Henry!” says Pepperwood Park proprietor Karen Shepherd. “Carl Hester phoned me one day and said, ‘I’ve got just the horse for you’. The horses that no-one else wants teach you how to ride and they are very cheap”

KOFFEE BREAK came into Andrew Gould’s life when he was establishing himself as a rider as a teenager. Andrew recalls: “I got Koffee Break when I was 14 and competed him until I was 21 — a seven-year relationship, but it wasn’t a marriage made in heaven. Quite the opposite. I hated him: he wasn’t a ‘nice’ horse.

The Amazing Spider Man was difficult at the start but his behaviour taught me that horses aren’t really naughty, it’s just an expression of their confusion,” says young Kent-based Jess Whitehead of the horse who made her a rider.