The 2024 Olympics are on the horizon and Team GB’s equestrians are heading for the Games in good heart, looking set to come home with a handful of medals once more.
It wasn’t always thus, for it was only at the 2012 London Olympics that Great Britain became a dominant force in dressage, Charlotte Dujardin emerging as a generational talent with an Olympic record score of 90.089% to take the individual gold medal, backing up the team gold that GB had already won earlier in the Games.
As Dane Rawlins noted in Horse & Hound, it was very much a team effort, Dujardin profiting from the work put in with her mentor Carl Hester, another member of the British team and a man who is, incidentally, set to go his seventh Olympics this summer.
“Charlotte Dujardin’s test was stunning. What she and Carl Hester have done is startling; this is what happens when you get your nut down and work full-time for someone who knows what they’re talking about.”
If you want to get yourself in the mood for Paris 2024, there’s no better place to start than Horse & Hounds’ extensive review of the London Olympics, here.
