CHarlotte Dujardin titled her 2018 memoir The Girl on the Dancing Horse in a move that seemed to acknowledge she was almost famous but not quite. After the Paris Olympics, she had her sights set on winning a medal and potentially becoming the top British female Olympian.
Her chance to make history disappeared before the Olympics even began. The 39-year-old withdrew after a video was made public four years ago that showed an “error in judgement” in which she allegedly abused a horse during a coaching session. The International Equestrian Federation (FEI) provisionally banned her for six months.
“While what happened is completely out of character for me and a far cry from how I train horses and mentor my students, there are no excuses for it,” Dujardin said. “I am deeply ashamed and should have set a better example at that moment.”
The move would end her meteoric rise in tragedy. She began the 2012 London Olympics as a relative unknown in the sporting world, but she and her dancing horse Valegro enthralled the crowds and won two gold medals. Dujardin won a gold and a silver medal four years later in Rio, and two bronzes three years ago in Tokyo, for a total of six medals, the same as Laura Kenny, although Kenny has more golds (five).
Born in Enfield, north London, and juggling her role as an elite athlete with her job as a teacher, Dujardin was an unlikely star in the rarefied world of dressage. She started riding at the age of two, riding her sister's horses home from the showjumping arena. This sparked an interest in showjumping, and by her mid-teens Dujardin was already a multiple winner at the prestigious Horse of the Year Show.
She first tried dressage at the age of 13, a sport in which the rider and horse perform complex dance-like movements such as tempes, zigzags, piaffe and pirouettes. In 2007, she bought her first Grand Prix horse, Fernandez, with money left by her late grandmother, and decided to pursue a career in dressage rather than as a rider. However, it was while riding the now-retired Valegro that she first made history, setting all three dressage world records with the pair.
Dujardin trained at Valegro, co-owned by renowned dressage trainer Carl Hester, and the two hit it off immediately. Hester sensed he had something special growing up, especially an incredible calm under pressure – the secret to the precision of dressage, where the slightest mistake can cost you a medal.
Commentators at the London Olympics reinforced Hester's impression, describing the connection between Dujardin and Valegro as “telepathic.” After his win, Dujardin jokingly said of his former mentor, “Carl's been in this sport for over 30 years, and he was like, for all I know, 'You son of a bitch! I've worked my whole life to win a medal, and you did it in two years and won two gold medals.'”
She also had high praise for Valegro, who is worth an estimated £6 million, saying: “He's like a Bentley to drive and is incredibly comfortable to ride, but he's also got the engine of a racing car and the brain of a very clever person. It's very rare to find a horse that has all those things.”
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By 2011, Dujardin and Valegro were part of the British team that won a gold medal at the European Championships in Rotterdam. She has won five other gold medals at European Championships and two at the Dressage World Cup.
Ten years later, Dujardin was expected to win another medal in Paris. However, pending the FEI's investigation, she has withdrawn from competition and said she would make no further comment until the investigation is completed. “I deeply regret my actions and am devastated to have let everyone down – including the British team, the fans and sponsors.”
The event was meant to be the first she'd taken her almost-one-year-old daughter, Isabella, to a competition. She was nine weeks old and still recovering from a C-section scar, and it was the first time she'd taken her to a competition. “I got to ride horses really fast, it was just insane,” she told The Guardian.
For a “very ambitious” person, she says, an unexpected benefit of having a child is the different perspective it gives: “The competition is just a game. Real life is watching your baby grow and change and start crawling and rolling over.”
