Interview by Chris Hector & Photos by Kit Houghton
The timing simply could not be better, in the run-up to the London Games, for the first time ever in the history of equestrian sport at the Olympics, the British Dressage Team is the very hot favourite for team gold, and for that matter, it is highly likely that a Brit will also take individual gold, and one guy right in the middle of all the hype is the ever-so-cool, ever-so-loveable, Carl Hester. But the real issue for a while was, would he keep the ride on his number one horse, Uthopia, long enough to make it to the Games?
As the end of December 2011 approached – and with it the cut-off point for new rider / horse combinations to be registered for the London Olympic Games – the rumour mill was in hyper drive, over and over we were assured that not only was Carl Hester’s Grand Prix star, Uthopia for sale, but he had actually been sold.
I asked Carl if he ever thought he was about to lose the horse:
“There was a slight moment, yeah. Everybody knows the story about the owner, she is a friend of mine, she has been a friend of mine for a long time, and she is having financial difficulties… I’d always said, you have to let me know if you are in a situation where you can’t keep the horse any longer. They didn’t ever let me know, but I just think that at the last minute there were people who thought they could make an offer on the horse so there were obviously some moments before Christmas, but they didn’t materialise.”
Nice Christmas present when the cut-off point came?
“Well by then it was all done and dusted and Sasha and I had saved him. It was just a matter of being given the opportunity to raise what was a very substantial amount of money in a very short space of time.”
It’s all irrelevant anyway – the German rumour mill tells me that the horse is hopelessly lame…
“Good, they’ll see that in Hagen in a few weeks. The rumor mill is incredible. What is incredible is that there is supposedly a mole over here, when I’ve dug that mole out, they are going to get bashed on the head with a shovel like you do when you find things you don’t want in the garden. Somebody from here is feeding information over there and I don’t know who it is…”
Have you ever gone into a Championship with this much pressure on you?
“No, never, obviously never because we’ve never been expected to win. It’s a shocking situation to be in. We’ve been talking about it this last week because I know how Charlotte (Dujardin star pupil and fellow team mate) works, and I know that before every show we get, oh I can’t ride, I can’t do it, he (Valegro) feels horrible, he’s pulling on the left, he’s pulling on the right, blah blah blah – and that’s the build up to every show I do with her, and of course when we get there, it all goes well, then the horse is marvelous five minutes after. But I’ve almost started going on like that myself, I guess it is just the feelings you get when you are going to a Championship.”
“We’ve never won anything that major before, when there has been that sort of pressure on us. You might say it is an unusual situation, but I think the good thing is that because the horses have been proven, then all we have to do is Hagen, then Charlotte will do Munich and I’ll do Lingen, so hopefully I’ll only have to do two shows if everything goes according to plan. So I can keep the horses fresh and at home and we don’t have to trek around Europe like we’ve done in previous years.”
Is that crucial to your whole training program, the fact that you do try to keep your horses very natural, you do try to hack them out, put them in paddocks…
“For sure. It’s hard going around shows and not being able to stick to my routine, it does interrupt my training. Obviously the shows I do, if I can get there in one day, then I am there for four or five days, and when you are there, there is no such thing as hacking out or days off. It’s crucial that I try to stick to my plan like I do at home, and as these two horses are proven, their temperaments are pretty special – it’s not like they need lots of shows – and I don’t want to over-show them.”
When your horses are in full work, what does a week’s program look like?
“A normal week would be: Monday and Tuesday, they do full work in the school, they would be out for about an hour in the morning, and they go hacking for half an hour – my groom takes them up the road so they walk on a hard surface. Then I work them in the arena for 45 minutes. Then they get turned out in their paddocks when they have finished work, then they come in just after lunch, then the grooms hack them for me in the afternoon. Now we are in full work, they are out twice a day. Mondays and Tuesdays, it is schooling and hacking in the afternoon, Wednesdays, they do hill work, Thursday and Friday they are in the school again, with a lunge in the afternoon or a hack. Saturdays, hacking and Sundays, just in the field and a little walk in hand. I am thinking all the time about getting their fitness up, but without all the schooling.”
How would you define your training methods – pretty straight down the middle classical German training principles…
“Nobody calls anybody ‘classical’ any more who competes… but it’s normal stretching work, normal collecting exercises, bending and straightening – it’s just gymnastics. No extremes, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that would make the eyes pop out of your head. These two horses are obviously fairly young – ten and eleven this year – and they have got there, and I don’t feel that I have to be doing any more than I am doing. The days I am not here, they just do stretching, I consider that as gymnastic as schooling the horse in collection. Straightforward, black and white.”
Who were the people who influenced your technique-cum-philosophy?
“Probably Dr B, (Dr Wilfried Bechtolsheimer, the German dressage aficionado who has been a long time resident of Great Britain, and who was a reserve rider for the British Olympic team to go to Atlanta. His daughter, Laura is one of the current stars of British dressage) but bear in mind, before him came Sheila Wilcox. She was a pioneer in British Equestrian sport, not only as a rider but in the way she kept horses and trained horses. She was an event rider and one of the first to ‘do’ dressage in those days. She was a huge stickler for all the details. She’d influenced Dr B, and I went to Dr B as a very naïve young person, ready to take anything on board and just do as I was told, which you do at that age. That was the routine I learned and I think the way I deal with things, and the attention to detail, probably comes from there.”
“The other influences are people nobody has ever heard of – the couple I evented for Jannie and Christopher Taylor, they took me on as family really, when I came to live from the island of Sark. I suppose it was the way they dealt with horses, they bought complete and utter wrecks and turned them around – that’s where my problem dealing probably comes from, but the routine would be from Dr B’s.”
Do you think it was a big advantage that you got the ride on a super horse – Giorgione – so early in your career?
“The interesting thing is that my route to the top is pretty much the way Charlotte has gone to the top. I did my first Grand Prix in March and rode in the World Games in June or July of that year. It’s a very fast track, but it does go to show that when you’ve got a horse like that, it can happen. But I’ll never forget after I’d done my first World Championship, someone said to me when I got home, ‘you’ve learned to steer your way around a Grand Prix, now you have to learn how to train…’ That’s something you really realize over time. You might consider yourself slightly clever for riding at a Championship, but training a horse is a whole different ball game.”
Is Uthopia the best one you’ve ever trained?
“I think Valegro is the best one I’ve ever trained. I think that horse has gold medal quality and I think Uthopia is not far behind. With Uthopia I’m up against God’s gift which is that freaking little walk, and there’s not a lot I can do about that – whereas Valegro has the whole package. Their temperaments and their trainability are really top, and the elasticity that they both have in the trot and the canter, but Valegro just has the edge with the bigger walk.”
You won’t be twitter-and-bisted if Charlotte beats you?
“Noooh! That doesn’t interest me at all, it’s a sign of age Chris, you know what that is. I get as much pleasure from watching someone else ride my horse as I do riding myself. In fact, as you get older, it’s a darn sight bloody easier making someone else do it. If she does it, that’s my success as well. She’s the rider, but I produced them and if she beats me… I won’t be letting it happen, but it would give me as much pleasure if it did happen.”
wonderful read, I can’t get enough of this man