The piaffe is probably the most demanding and exquisite movement in the Olympic sport of dressage. A horse in piaffe defies what horses otherwise do. Instead of going anywhere, it jogs on the spot, three-quarters of a ton of moving muscle, feet rising and falling in the same four hoofprints like an animation in a flip book. Next week, in Rio de Janeiro, seven judges around an arena, known as a manège, will evaluate the piaffes of the four-day dressage competition. In addition to making sure that the horses don’t go forward or backward, or side to side, the judges will keep track of the number of steps (twelve to fifteen), their height (as high as the cannon bone on the foreleg; as high as the fetlock on the rear), and insure that they are not, in the somewhat baroque language of the sport, “unlevel.” Then they will score each piaffe out of ten.
No one knows what piaffing is for. The movements of dressage are said to have their origins in the training of horses for war, and one theory suggests that the piaffe might have been useful for trampling enemies. But the piaffe became an abstraction long ago, like the pike in diving, or the asymmetrical bars. By 1733, when François Robichon de la Guérinière, the equerry to Louis XIV of France, wrote a seminal guide to horsemanship, the piaffe had already become a thing of mere ornament. The correctly piaffing horse, de la Guérinière wrote, “stands in awe of the rider’s hand and legs.”
Charlotte Dujardin, a thirty-one-year-old British rider who is the European, World, and Olympic dressage champion, rode her first piaffe in the summer of 1999. She was in a sand arena at Wrotham Park, a Palladian manor in the suburbs of North London. Dujardin, who was fourteen, was spending a week helping out Debi Thomas, a friend of her mother’s, who worked in the stables on the property. Thomas had a twelve-year-old dressage horse that was trained to Grand Prix level—dressage has eight “heights,” of which Grand Prix is the highest—but it was struggling for rhythm in its piaffe. She had been schooling the horse, a mare named Truday, from the ground but needed a rider on top.
Thomas has trained horses for forty years, and she has never, before or since, put a child on the back of one trained to Grand Prix. Dressage horses are frequently compared to gymnasts. From the age of four, they undergo five or six years of strengthening and suppling exercises before they’re able to carry out the advanced movements: the piaffe, the passage (a slow, prancing trot, pronounced as in French), and the pirouette (a hand-brake turn, ideally executed in six to eight strides). There are fewer than a hundred Grand Prix horses in Britain, and a good one costs several hundred thousand dollars.
But Thomas had been watching Dujardin ride since she was a toddler. Dujardin’s mother, Jane, used to keep a pair of jumping horses at home. At the age of two, Dujardin would scramble onto their backs and gee them round the stables, clicking and hollering. When Dujardin got on Truday, and followed Thomas’s instructions—shortening Truday’s strides, shifting its weight to the hindquarters—the horse began to jig. “It was no big deal to her,” Thomas said. But Dujardin looked down and caught the expression on the trainer’s face. “She was, like, mesmerized,” Dujardin recalled recently.
Within days, Thomas had Dujardin performing flying changes—in which the horse skips from one foot to the other, in mid-canter—and the passage. “She just explained what I needed to do, and that was it,” Dujardin said. Her mother looked on from the rail. Jane had grown up on a farm in Hertfordshire. She had been an ardent show jumper, but her parents never came to watch. When Jane had children of her own—two daughters, Emma-Jayne and Charlotte, and a younger son, Charles—she poured herself into the world of show ponies and junior competitions. The girls began competing at the age of three. “They did want to do it, because it was my passion to make them want to do it,” Jane said. The family kept only first- and second-place rosettes.
“Literally all our money went on it,” Dujardin’s father, Ian, told me. “All of it.” Ian ran a packaging company, and in 1992, when Dujardin was seven, he won a large contract to wrap up mirrors. He spent fifty thousand dollars on a show pony for his daughters. But by the summer of 1999 another packaging deal had gone badly wrong. “It pulled everything down,” Jane said. “Our house, our home, our everything.” The Dujardins had to sell the show pony, and the horse box.
As Jane watched her daughter ride, she felt both joy and dread. It was obvious that Dujardin should pursue dressage. There was just no way to afford it. Even within the expensive world of equestrian sport, dressage stands apart for the aristocracy of its ideals and the wealth of its participants. Ann Romney sent a horse to the 2012 Games. In 2008, Denmark was represented by Princess Nathalie, of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. Élite foals cost as much as sixty thousand dollars; medal-winning horses go for millions; the expenses of taking part are fantastic; and the prize money is pitiful. The careers of top riders can last decades, so the best horses and the richest benefactors have a way of gravitating to them, concentrating the glory of dressage like the blood of the Hapsburgs. “It’s a vicious circle,” Astrid Appels, the editor of Eurodressage.com, one of the sport’s leading Web sites, told me. “The weak in the wallet can often not afford competing at international level.”
The Dujardins knew all this. “It has always been a pompous sport, a money sport,” Ian Dujardin told me. “We were just about paying the rent,” Jane said. “How was I going to fulfill what I thought she needed to do?”
Dressage is one of those Olympic sports that you catch yourself watching when you walk back into the room and realize that you left the TV on. It’s legacy stuff, like archery, or the hammer, that sneaked into the Games at some point and hasn’t quite been thrown out—although dressage has come closer than most. At the 1952 and 1956 Olympics, blatant favoritism by judges to riders from their own nations almost led to the sport’s expulsion. (Prince Bernhard, of the Netherlands, intervened.) The solution, which involved filming each ride and arguing about it for half an hour, pretty much killed dressage as a spectator sport. “The interest of the public died down alarmingly,” Colonel Alois Podhajsky, the director of the Spanish Riding School, in Vienna, wrote of a visit to the Rome Olympics, in 1960.
The sport was rejuvenated in the nineties, when a new event, the freestyle, came on the scene. The freestyle made its Olympic début in Atlanta, in 1996, and since then has helped nudge the sport toward the same emotional, aesthetic realm as figure skating: no one knows what the hell is going on, but at least it looks nice. In the freestyle, riders devise their own routines, which are set to musical medleys, usually with any words removed, because they can distract the horses. The event is the climax of the Olympic competition and decides the individual medals. During the previous three days, horses and riders compete for team medals in the sport’s traditional tests—the Grand Prix and the Grand Prix Special—which involve a strict series of movements. Then everyone watches novel combinations of piaffe, half-pass (in which the horses go forward and sideways at the same time), and extended trot, while the theme from “Pirates of the Caribbean” blasts across the manège.
The freestyle probably saved dressage, but it masks the sport’s essential grandeur. No other event in Rio this summer can claim Xenophon, the ancient Greek general and student of Socrates, as its first coach. Xenophon’s “On Horsemanship,” written in the fourth century B.C., contains training exercises that are still used in dressage, as well as the sport’s ethical rationale: “Anything forced or misunderstood can never be beautiful.” The treatise was rediscovered during the Renaissance and helped inspire the golden age of classical riding—displays for kings and courtiers in the great houses of Europe—which more or less ended with the French Revolution.
Within the sport, none of this feels particularly distant. Everything is judged according to sacred precepts—“harmony,” “impulsion,” “self-carriage,” “submission”—that have come down intact from the ancien régime. Dressage feels culturally other because it is. No country outside Europe has managed to win an individual Olympic dressage medal since the United States did it, in 1932. The most plausible story behind the twelve cryptic letters that line the manège and indicate where movements stop and start is that they mark where German princes liked their underlings to stand. “V” is for “vassal.”
Since she began competing internationally, five years ago, Dujardin has occasionally threatened the feudal niceties of dressage. She wears a crash helmet with her tailcoat and white gloves, rather than the customary top hat, and enjoys dominating a sport in which she frequently finds herself up against more gilded competitors. “When they get in the arena,” Dujardin told me, “they have got no nerve.” And yet Dujardin’s riding, which is normally so subtle as to be virtually unnoticeable, is helping to reform dressage and to bring it to a state of near-perfection. In 2006, the Dutch three-time Olympic champion Anky van Grunsven became the first rider to score more than eighty per cent in a Grand Prix test. In five years, Dujardin has surpassed that sixteen times, and currently holds the world record in all three forms of the sport.
In 2014, Dujardin scored 94.300 per cent in the freestyle, raising, at least in theory, the possibility of the immaculate ride. “It is a new world, you can say,” Suzanne Baarup, a Danish dressage judge who has marked several of Dujardin’s performances, told me. “Why can you not achieve a hundred per cent?” Dujardin has never really been able to explain what she does. “I want to create,” she said. “It is probably like an artist. They see in their head what they want to draw, and they draw it. It is like I have a feeling inside me that I want to create on a horse, and that is what I do.”
After her stint with Thomas, Dujardin began to study dressage from a DVD. The presenter was Carl Hester, an Olympic rider and trainer who has competed for Britain since 1990. Hester is from the Channel Island of Sark, where there are no cars. His first horse was a donkey, and in the past twenty years he has done more than anyone to popularize dressage in a country more traditionally oriented toward rougher forms of horse riding: foxhunting, racing, and three-day eventing.
In her bedroom, Dujardin watched Hester teach his horses the elevated strides of dressage. Then she went and practiced on the family’s remaining pony, an Irish thoroughbred named Charlie McGee. After she left school, at sixteen, Dujardin became a groom at a yard run by Judy Harvey, a trainer, judge, and BBC dressage commentator. Harvey recognized Dujardin’s talent. “She just watched it, looked at it, did it,” she told me. Harvey had a horse that she had been trying to teach to piaffe for months; Dujardin taught it in two days.
In 2002, Jane’s mother died, leaving an inheritance that allowed the Dujardins to put a down payment on a house and to buy Charlotte a dressage horse. That summer, Jane and her daughters went to an auction, where a slim three-year-old gelding bolted around the arena, ran toward the wall, and performed a smart flying change. “That’s one for Charlotte,” Jane said, and bought the horse, a chestnut Westphalian named Fernandez, for eighteen thousand pounds.
Dujardin trained Fernandez for three years, working in a pub to earn money. When she was twenty-one, she went to a talent-spotting day at Addington Manor, in Buckinghamshire. A panel of judges watched fifty-six young horses and their riders, and chose a handful for a national training program. Carl Hester was helping out as a test rider. When the judges didn’t select Dujardin and Fernandez, Hester questioned their decision. “I said, ‘Let me sit on it,’ ” he told me. Dujardin watched as Hester rode Fernandez around the manège.
Hester got his big break as a young rider when he was hired by Wilfried Bechtolsheimer, a German industrialist and dressage enthusiast based in Gloucestershire. Bechtolsheimer had a stable of Grand Prix horses, and it was only by riding them every day that Hester absorbed the intricacies of the sport. On Fernandez, he was struck by the fact that Dujardin had been able to train the horse so well without ever having ridden a top horse herself. “She had managed to teach that without having felt it,” he said. The judges didn’t change their minds that day, but Hester agreed to give Dujardin lessons. Dujardin kissed her saddle, and swore that she would never wash it.
The mysteries of dressage are many and not unrelated to love. Young horses mature well or badly. Riders fall and lose their nerve. There is always a search for the feeling of connection, and no guarantee that you will find it. Horses impossible for one rider will dance for somebody else. Mediocre riders flourish on horses given up for the same reason. There are relationships that make everybody better than they ever were, and there are horses and riders that simply never meet.
During one of her first lessons with Hester, Dujardin saw a four-year-old dark bay horse cantering down the far side of the manège. “I was, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” she recalled. “He was so powerful.” In dressage, a young horse’s walk and canter are considered largely unalterable (a trot is different—a trot you can fix), and this horse’s canter was enormous. On Fernandez, Dujardin’s challenge had always been to enhance the horse’s gaits, but with this horse, Valegro, she could see that the task was the opposite: to somehow capture and control his energy. When Hester took Dujardin on, a few months later, as a pupil—in return for lessons and lodging for Fernandez, she would clean stables and warm up his horses—part of her job was to exercise Valegro. “I just wanted to figure him out,” she said.
Since leaving Bechtolsheimer, Hester had competed without major financial backing. He taught, rented out stables, and sold horses that he bought young and trained himself. In 2005, he sold his twelve-year-old Olympic horse, Escapado, to a rival and added Valegro to his stable. Valegro, a Dutch warmblood gelding, cost only four thousand pounds, but he wasn’t developing as Hester had hoped. His movements were so strong that they hurt Hester’s back when he rode, and his frame was on the small side. “I wanted something more elegant,” Hester said. More worrying, Valegro was a head-shaker—a sign of nerves that can ruin a dressage horse’s career. In 2006, Hester tried to sell Valegro but was unable to find a buyer. When Dujardin arrived, desperate to ride everything in the yard, he was relieved. “I was, like, ‘You can have him,’ ” he said.
In the spring of 2007, Hester took part in the Sunshine Tour, a dressage competition that takes place in the south of Spain. He was gone for a month. Dujardin mucked out stables in the mornings, and during the afternoons, in the yard’s indoor school, which had mirrors—not unlike those in a dance studio—she rode Valegro. “I just wanted him to relax,” she said. Dujardin has worked on anxious horses since she was a little girl. Families would bring round naughty ponies for her to school. “Every horse I get on I can adapt to,” she told me. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Valegro was hot. “It was just, ‘Go, go, go, go, go!’ ” Dujardin said. “I used my reins and nothing happened.” The horse, whose nickname was Blueberry, tossed his head and raised his front legs at the same time. Eventually, Dujardin managed to calm him down. When Hester got back, Dujardin showed him Valegro’s progress. The canter was coming into shape. “We used to walk down the drive and then back again. I said, ‘Please don’t sell him. Please don’t sell him. Just let me have a chance to ride.’ ”
They agreed that Dujardin would begin the slow process of bringing Valegro through his levels—years of training and minor competitions—and Hester would take over as the horse neared Grand Prix status. “I was going to take him on as an eight-year-old,” Hester said. It was a typical arrangement for a dressage stable. Grooms and under-riders work on younger horses. Competition riders and their sponsors—people with money on the line—take them through to international competition. “That is life, that is the way it works,” Dujardin said.
She trained relentlessly, riding as many as eleven horses a day. Unusually, in a sport that still retains an amateur, cavalier spirit, Dujardin lived as an athlete. Since she was a teen-ager, she has swum, worked out, watched her diet. Dujardin’s riding is quiet, in part because her body is strong. “She could sit there with no reins. She would still be in the same place,” Hester told me. “She is a very modern-day rider.”
Her fault was pushing too hard. “The horses don’t take it,” Hester said. “When she rode them, she liked to pretend they were winning a gold medal every day.” Early on, Hester nicknamed Dujardin Edwina, after Edward Scissorhands, because her hands could be harsh, but he was also invigorated by the younger rider. Since the 2004 Olympics, when Hester finished thirteenth, his own riding had been in a rut. Now in his mid-forties, Hester found that he wanted to compete again.
In 2010, a TV crew made a short documentary series about life at the yard. Onscreen, Dujardin and Hester bicker like an odd couple. (Hester is eighteen years older than Dujardin, and gay. She calls him Grandad.) The show includes the moment when Hester was supposed to take back Valegro. That fall, at the national championships, Dujardin rode the horse in the Prix St. George, the level below Grand Prix. The camera catches Dujardin as she leaves the manège, fuming at an error that Valegro has made. “He’s too hot, he’s too hot,” she says. Hester waves her away. A few minutes later, when Dujardin finds out that she has won, she is transformed. She larks about with photographers, jumps into a hot tub in her riding breeches, and sips champagne. The series ends with Dujardin daring Hester to ride Valegro now. Since 2007, the pair had won every class they entered. The master had been outfoxed by his groom. “She was absolutely not going to give me that horse back,” Hester said.
In March, 2011, Dujardin and Valegro competed in their first dressage Grand Prix, in the South of France. They came in first, and won six hundred and fifty euros—barely enough to cover the trip. Hester has never paid Dujardin a salary, and she was struggling to get by. By now, Fernandez had reached Grand Prix level as well, and Dujardin decided to sell the horse to finance her career. The money paid off her parents’ mortgage and allowed her to buy a house near Hester’s yard.
A Norwegian rider named Cathrine Rasmussen bought Fernandez. Rasmussen is based in Denmark, where she works out of the yard of Hasse Hoffmann, a well-known trainer. When we spoke, Hoffmann recalled his client’s delight at buying a horse from Hester’s stable which had once scored seventy-four per cent at Grand Prix. Hoffmann warned Rasmussen that she might not be able to get the same results as an experienced rider like Hester. “But yeah, Hasse,” she replied. “It is the groom that is riding it.” Hoffmann laughed as he told me the story. “You know who the groom was? The fucking best rider in the world.”
Jean-Michel Roudier, a French Olympic-level judge, saw Dujardin ride for the first time at her second Grand Prix, in April, 2011, in Saumur. Dujardin was on Valegro, while Hester rode Uthopia, a dark bay stallion from his stable. They finished second and first, respectively. Roudier was judging at the letter “M,” on the long side of the manège. “Oh, my goodness,” he said to himself. “There is the future of dressage.”
For years, the sport had been ruled by highly drilled, fine-boned horses from Germany and the Netherlands, where advances in breeding were producing animals with long legs, capable of exceptional movements. But at Saumur Roudier was captivated by the strength of Hester’s new horses. They moved more like athletes. “It is a sport,” Roudier said. “It is not only dancing.” That summer, a British team of four riders, led by Hester and with Dujardin as the newcomer, won the European dressage title for the first time.
Dujardin was still relatively unknown when she rode Valegro at Hagen, in Germany, in the first major competition of 2012. She was on edge. “You always think, Bloody hell, I am in Germany,” she told me. (Since the 1964 Olympics, Germany has won the team dressage gold ten times.) It was hot in Hagen, and there were lots of flies. Valegro’s head-shaking came back. Dujardin managed to win her first test, the Grand Prix, but as she was warming up for her second—the Grand Prix Special—Valegro began tossing his head, and Hester and Dujardin had an argument about the way she was riding her flying changes. “Carl was shouting at me,” she said. “And I’m, like . . . my God, don’t do this to me.”
It was a relief to be in the ring. In the Grand Prix Special, each rider performs the same thirty-six movements in order. Music plays in the background, and in Hagen, in honor of the upcoming London Olympics, it was the theme from “The Great Escape,” the British war movie. The refrain eerily matched the steps of Valegro’s passage. Christoph Hess, who was in charge of dressage instruction for Germany’s national riding federation, realized that no one was talking. Dujardin and Valegro eased from one movement to the next. “He did piaffe transitions, passage, flying changes,” Hess said. “Everything like being in another world.” Dujardin and Valegro set a new world record of 88.022 per cent. Isobel Wessels, a British judge at “C,” did her best to keep her scores under control, to avoid accusations of nationalism. “It was like a moment,” she said. “Like you remember where you were when Princess Diana died.”
The ride in Hagen not only made Dujardin a contender for gold in London but also announced her—and Hester—as potential redeemers of dressage. Since the eighteenth century, when classical-riding displays became the basis for the modern circus, the sport has been tainted by the notion that it is somehow deviant and even cruel, a display of human power rather than of equine skill.
During the nineteen-nineties and the aughts, a training technique known as “rollkur,” in which the necks of dressage horses are held tight against their chests, became widely publicized. Horse-welfare groups filmed German and Dutch riders forcing their horses’ heads down for minutes at a time. Photographs circulated of horses with bleeding mouths and tongues blue from tension. In 2009, Isabell Werth, a German multigold medallist, was banned for doping her horse with fluphenazine, a sedative used in the treatment of schizophrenia. “It was just a real egotistical nightmare,” Paul Belasik, an American classical-riding trainer, told me.
Valegro and Dujardin presented a different image of the sport. Hester was known as an easygoing, orthodox trainer. His horses jumped and went out in the fields. In London, cheered on by huge crowds at Greenwich Park, on the banks of the Thames, Hester, Dujardin, and Laura Bechtolsheimer—the daughter of Hester’s old patron—won the team gold, Britain’s first-ever dressage medal.
The freestyle was held two days later, in bright sunshine. Dujardin, on Valegro, rode last. The penultimate competitor was Adelinde Cornelissen, a Dutch rider on Parzival, a fifteen-year-old chestnut gelding. Performing to selections from “The Nutcracker,” Cornelissen appeared to ride flawlessly. Valegro stumbled into his final pirouette. When Dujardin came out of the manège, Hester said the mistake had probably cost her the gold. An official checked the horse’s bit. High above, Dujardin saw a woman leaning over the grandstand. “You’ve done it!” the woman shouted, half an instant before the stadium erupted. “Like the roof fell down,” Dujardin said. The Dutch were furious, and complained. But the result stood. The judges noticed that Parzival’s jaws had crossed during the test, a sign of the horse’s discomfort.
After the Games, Hester took the British riders to Sark to celebrate. There was a vin d’honneur, a traditional Channel Island feast, and Hester opened the annual horse, dog, and pet show. But Dujardin was an intermittent, fragile presence at the festivities. Valegro was for sale.
The plan had been in place for some time. Hester had done the same with his previous Olympic horse, Escapado, which he had co-owned with a friend, Roly Luard, who restores English country houses. In 2007, Luard had taken a half-share in Valegro, and now the two of them had the opportunity to finance Hester’s yard, and Luard’s involvement in the sport, for years. “I can’t keep shelving out,” Luard told me. “I can’t just add lots of horses to my books.” For Dujardin, however, the sale of Valegro was a devastating prospect. On Sark, Richard Davison, who had managed the British dressage team, sought to comfort her, but he didn’t know what to say. “If you don’t have a world-class horse,” he told me, “you can be a world-class rider, but it is worthless.”
While Valegro was being vetted for the sale, Dujardin’s parents took her to Portugal to distract her. “We walked round and round and round,” Jane said. “You could see she was in this never-never land.” Dujardin understood Hester’s financial limits better than most. “Carl has also come from a family with no background,” she told me. “But it was so hard, because I really didn’t want the horse to go. And it was, like, just the fact that it was for money. That was all. It was just all about money.”
Hester felt uneasy, too. In the back of everyone’s mind was Totilas, a tall black stallion, whose career had come to symbolize the sport’s excesses. Totilas was the first horse to break the ninety-per-cent barrier in dressage, taking his Dutch rider, Edward Gal, to a clean sweep of the three tests in the sport’s World Cup, in 2010. Totilas caused mayhem in dressage. No one had ever seen the movements executed with such panache. But the horse also divided the sport. Gal was accused of using rollkur in his training—a charge that he denies—and critics saw Totilas as an artificial creation. “Sometimes people thought it was a little bit too much circus,” Suzanne Baarup, the Danish judge, told me. Then, weeks after his triumph at the World Cup, Totilas was sold to a German yard, for a rumored fifteen million euros. Eurodressage.com crashed from the traffic. But Totilas never went as well for his new rider. Injured before the London Games, he retired from the sport last year.
There were two potential buyers for Valegro, both from overseas. Luard and Hester negotiated for six months with the second. Hester veered between his misgivings and his plans to buy houses and cars, and to pay off his debts. “It was very exciting,” he said. “I can’t deny it.” But Dujardin suffered in the uncertainty. She and Hester argued. Dujardin and her partner, a South African long-distance runner named Dean Wyatt Golding, briefly broke up. At the last moment, the bid to buy Valegro fell through. “They were all set,” Luard told me. “Then the money never went in the bank.”
Valegro’s future took eighteen months to resolve. Hester finally stopped talking to the buyers, and in early 2014 he and Luard formed a syndicate, in which a new investor, Anne Barrott, bought a third of the horse. Valegro would stay at the yard.
Later that year, Dujardin devised a new freestyle for Valegro. She made the floor plan as difficult as she could imagine, opening with a half-pass in trot that moved into a half-pass in passage, followed by a combined piaffe and pirouette and straight into another phase of passage. She rode an extended canter into a double pirouette, and set the test to music from “How to Train Your Dragon.” Dujardin and Valegro performed the routine for the first time at the Olympia horse show, in London, that December. Together, they broke the last of Totilas’s world records. “I literally did the final bit with tears rolling down my face, because he is the sort of horse that gives you everything,” Dujardin said. “He gives you everything, and I can feel the partnership and the connection. He is, like, with me.”
On a recent Tuesday morning, I travelled to Gloucestershire to watch Hester and Dujardin train. Hester’s yard is on the edge of the Forest of Dean, on the grounds of an old mill. Rio will be Valegro’s final Olympics—he is fourteen, and the plan is to retire him at the end of the year. Hester and Dujardin have been keeping the horse under wraps in recent months, competing only once and training at seven-thirty in the morning, when they have the yard to themselves. Dujardin is spending more of her time developing new horses, and that morning she was working on Mount St. John Freestyle, a seven-year-old mare that she is training for the Tokyo Games, in 2020.
Freestyle belongs to Emma Blundell, a supermarket heiress who runs a large dressage stud farm in Yorkshire, and the young horse has already shown an unusual aptitude for the sport’s advanced movements. “You’re such a clever person,” Dujardin said, stroking her brown back. “Aren’t you?” Two grooms tacked up the horse, putting on white booties to prevent her rear and front hooves from clashing. Nearby shelves held tubs of gut balancer, biotin hoof supplement, and electrolyte-maintenance liquid. There were two Valegro figurines in boxes. Dujardin often feels cold, and although the day was warm, she wore a gray hoodie with her Great Britain crash helmet.
At the far end of the manège, Hester sat on one of two chairs, raised on a dais. Six dogs tumbled around him. Geese barked nearby. Dujardin entered the arena and began to trot and then canter so close to the edge that, each time she and Freestyle passed, the air stirred briefly. As she practiced movements, Hester called out in the dense patois of dressage. “O.K., the last one is downhill. You need a little bit more canter, a little bit more arch,” he said, of a series of flying changes that Dujardin was riding past a long mirror set up at “B.”
Dujardin performed leg yields and shoulder-ins, flexing exercises that date back hundreds of years, and Hester mused for a moment on their history. “Moving away from a sword,” he said. “Moving in to hack someone’s head off, or whatever.” He kept a quiet score of Dujardin’s movements: seven point five, eight, the occasional nine. I asked whether Dujardin was doing the same in her head. “She just says either it’s good or it’s shit,” Hester said. Dujardin barely spoke during the session. Her eyes seemed focussed in the middle distance. The detail of dressage riding takes place in the seat—where one creature’s balance informs the other. Dujardin cantered toward us in a zigzag, skipping the horse onto a different leg at each turn. “There you go,” Hester called. Dujardin swept past. “Bit twisted,” she said.
A few days later, Dujardin and Valegro rode their final rehearsal before Rio at a small dressage competition held at Hartpury College, an agricultural school a few miles from Hester’s yard. For the freestyle performance at the Games, Dujardin has decided to keep her record-breaking floor plan, but she had asked her composer, Tom Hunt, to arrange a new Brazilian-themed score. Hunt e-mailed the latest version of the music that afternoon. Dujardin and Valegro were on at ten-fifteen at night. They were the final pair, and a crowd of six hundred was there to watch.
Half an hour before they went on, Dujardin and Valegro warmed up in a floodlit barn on a hill above the college’s indoor arena. Dujardin wore a red down vest over her dark-blue tailcoat. In the flesh, Valegro is like a small train. Puffing among the two or three other horses waiting to perform, he seemed possessed of a different force. Up close, when he shouldered past, the veins on his flanks looked like the estuary of a river system. Hester watched, speaking into a small microphone that transmitted to an earpiece in Dujardin’s helmet. “Work on the lightness,” he said, as she practiced a pirouette at the far end of the barn. As Valegro has aged and mellowed, Dujardin’s competitive energy has remained undimmed, and one of Hester’s challenges is to keep the two in synch. “Smooth,” he said, as she rode a set of perfect changes toward him. “Good.”
Gradually, other riders went out to perform. Valegro and Dujardin had the manège to themselves. She rode past a mirror in passage. She was about to take the horse down the hill. She was about to take off her vest. She was about to ride into the arena and raise her right hand for the music to begin. She was about to ride her impossible routine, to follow an extended canter with a double pirouette. She was about to score more than ninety per cent, enough for gold in Rio. Her mother, watching from a balcony above the arena, was about to cry. And plenty of other people would cry, too, because it moves us when we see a person in true communion with a horse. Dujardin was ready. Valegro crossed the barn in half-pass. Hester made to leave. Then Dujardin turned Valegro back into the middle of the manège. She wanted to ride the steps of one last piaffe. The horse’s shoulders began to rise. But Hester cut them off. “Enough,” he said. “Save it for the ring.” ♦