Team GB’s dressage riders block out Dujardin noise to take team bronze at Paris 2024

For Carl Hester and the dressage team, this was the best riposte. All week, their sport had been under the most intense scrutiny. Its finest practitioner, Charlotte Dujardin, had been removed from Olympic competition after a video surfaced of her abusing a horse. Ever since, a deafening noise has built around the sport, the suspicion growing that this was not an isolated incident, that this is a sport based on forcing horses to do things they do not want to do. Here, by way of answer, was a bronze medal in the team event, delivered via a collective performance of grace, style and panache. And without a whip in sight.

“You feel like the world is watching you,” said Hester, for whom this was the seventh Olympics of his now 35-year sporting career. “It’s been a week of very different emotions. This is a fantastic way to top it.”

The competition took place in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, the three-sided arena affording views across the park to the opulent surrounds of what was the former home of French royalty. Which seemed an appropriate setting. You imagine this was the sport of choice of Louis XIV, that Marie Antoinette let her dressage horses eat cake. And the surrounds seemed to invest the piaffes, the passages and the canter pirouettes a backcloth of the kind of pomp and elegance that suited its processes.

Even its warmest aficionados would acknowledge those processes are lengthy. Each of the 10 teams consisted of three riders; 30 equestrians each going through the same set of routines, carefully, deliberately and with as much aplomb as they could muster, steering their mounts around the arena for considerably more than five minutes at a time. Watching on, it was as if time seemed to slow to the kind of walking pace only dressage horses can adopt. As riders and mounts went they were scored for the precision, control and artistic merit, their efforts for each section of the routine immediately broadcast on the screens around the arena, allowing spectators to keep pace with how they were doing relative to their rivals. First off for Britain was Becky Moody. Ten days ago she had been expecting to be on holiday in France right now. Instead Dujardin had self-immolated and, at the age of 44, here she was the substitute rider making her Olympic debut.

“There have definitely been moments of complete nausea,” she said of her improbably hectic few days.

It was Moody who was reckoned Britain’s weak link. Dujardin, the country’s equal most decorated female Olympian of all time, is a mistress of big events, with a ferocious competitive drive. Without her the team was reckoned by many observers to be weakened beyond the possibility of gaining a medal. Not that you would have noticed it. At the end of the first round of 10 riders, Moody, poised, straight backed, elegant, posted the best score to put Britain in the lead with a third of the competition gone.

“That score from Becky took the pressure off me,” said Hester. “It meant I could relax a little.”

It was as well she had scored so highly. The next round saw Hester overtaken by both the Danes and the Germans, whose riders posted huge scores. And when Lottie Fry went out last for Britain, good as the former world champion was, registering a hefty 79.483 points as she smoothly negotiated her horse through its paces, first the Danes, then the Germans surpassed their efforts. Hester, though, was not complaining. He was delighted that, despite losing his long-term training partner Dujardin, the woman he brought into the sport in the first place and who then dominated its Olympic medal tables for so long, the Brits were able to deliver a podium performance.

“That’s really important, given how much she contributed,” he said. “A lot of people thought if she wasn’t on the team we wouldn’t medal. It was very important to show that.”

Though as yet he had not had any congratulatory message from Dujardin. “That’s because I don’t have my phone with me,” Hester, the master of diplomacy, explained. “I’ll sit down later in the evening and take some time with it and I’ll see if she has [sent a message]”.

On Sunday, all three of the British team go in the individual event. But their performance, in many ways against all the odds, means that Britain has now won a medal in all three of the equestrian team events at these Games. Which, despite all the noise, does not suggest a sport in crisis.

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