British equestrian athletes centre stage in 2018

In eventing, Great Britain looks set to finish the year with the No.1- and No.2-ranked riders in the world, Oliver Townend and Rosalind Canter, followed by New Zealand’s Tim Price – who lives with his wife and fellow eventer Jonelle in England. In 2018, Townend won in Kentucky and finished second at Burghley and Badminton. At the latter competition, the rider was officially warned for over-using his whip. Initially defiant, he eventually apologised: “Having watched my Badminton cross-country rounds for the first time when I got home last night, I’m so disappointed and upset about the way I rode. It didn’t look good and I don’t want to look like that.”

For her part, Canter shone at September’s FEI World Equestrian Games (WEG) in North Carolina, winning the Individual World Championship with her 13-year-old gelding Allstar B and contributing to a Team gold, with Ireland taking silver. Afterwards, Canter paid tribute to, among others, the team’s High Performance Coach Christopher Bartle, who had returned to the UK after helping Michael Jung and his German teammates rise to the top of the sport.

Another German rider won the Individual gold in show jumping at the Tryon Games: Simone Blum, on her mare DSP Alice. Blum was the first woman to win this title at the WEG since they were created in 1990 (She was also named best athlete at the 2018 FEI Awards). The United States picked up Team gold and Australia qualified for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in all three disciplines. But threatened by a hurricane and disrupted by organisational problems – which among other things led to the cancellation of the long-distance endurance competition – the 2018 WEG left the Fédération Équestre Internationale with many questions about the future of the Games. In fact, currently, there are no clear candidates to host the event in 2022, and it seems likely that they will be reduced in size or divided into individual championships. 

One thing that is clear is the high-flying performance this year of British show jumper Ben Maher, who is in London this week at the Olympia Horse Show. He captured both the regular season Longines Global Champions Tour and team-based Global Champions League titles, winning four Grand Prix on his horses Explosion W and Winning Good. Another Olympian in the sport, American Beezie Madden, with Breitling LS, raced to victory at the Longines FEI Jumping World Cup Final in Paris in the spring. Madden, whose victory automatically qualified her for next year’s Final in Sweden, nevertheless sits near the top of the World Cup qualifying standings in North America. 

And in dressage, Madden’s compatriot Laura Graves, with Verdades, became World No.1 for a couple months this autumn, only for German equestrian icon Isabell Werth to regain the top two spots in the rankings with different horses. But Werth, the most decorated equestrian Olympian in any discipline, will have to contend with rivals like British dressage star Charlotte Dujardin, who returned to competition earlier this year after her champion partner Valegro retired in 2016. 

Looking forward to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics and beyond, the new head of the British Equestrian Federation’s World Class programme, Victoria Underwood, said recently that her aim is to work with the country’s athletes, including those mentioned above, to “make Great Britain the leading equestrian nation on and off the field of play.”