‘I smiled and said merci!’: Carl Hester and Fame’s rollercoaster ride in the Olympic dressage team competition

Carl Hester and Fame were second to go for the British team in the Paris 2024 Olympic dressage grand prix special, scoring 76.52% to finish third in their group.

Carl had an expensive mistake in the second extended trot, with Fame breaking into canter. Before going to Paris Carl told H&H that the extensions were a movement he was going to push in, but on this occasion, it didn’t quite come off.

Despite being disappointed, Carl did a fantastic job of bringing their score back up using all his experience. He maintained his composure and steadily worked through each of the following movements with precision.

“I had a fragile start,” admitted Carl after his test. “He was still brilliant, but he was so spooky in the beginning I couldn’t get along the sides.

“Of course, everything in this test happens on the side, and I was next to the judge when he rang the bell and [Fame] immediately jumped sideways – I smiled and said ‘Merci!’

“So he was a little nervous at the beginning, but to think [of the score] he went down to at the beginning of the test because of the mistakes and then come back up with all these good marks.

“Of course, we all want to win gold, but after the week we’ve had, if we get a medal as a team we’ll be feeling united and excited.”

Thanks to Becky Moody and Jagerbomb topping the first group on a personal best of 76.49% Britain is still in medal contention, but no longer in pole position.

“Watching Becky this morning was very emotional for me,” Carl added. “She went beyond what we expected. That made my life a little bit easier because even when something went wrong in my test, I still knew I had Becky’s score behind me and I had a bit of leeway because she had been so brilliant.”

While it would’ve taken something spectacular here to keep Britain’s gold sweep in the equestrian events going, the team has opened a sizeable margin between themselves and the Netherlands in fourth.

Going into the last group Germany currently sits first on 155.836, Denmark second on 154.453, with the British team on 153.009.

That means Lottie Fry and Glamourdale will need to finish almost 3% ahead of Jessica von Bredow-Werndl (TSF Dalera BB) and Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour (Freestyle) in the all-star final group to secure team gold – stranger things have happened, but they’ll be relying on the top two scorers from the grand prix making a mistake.

They’ll be riding down the centre line at 3.05pm local time (2.05pm British time).

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