At the end of last month, there was no hint of the crisis to come at Oaklebrook Mill in Gloucestershire, the yard where Charlotte Dujardin has trained for more than a decade. The queen of dressage was readying herself for what she anticipated would be her fourth Olympic Games and had invited Telegraph Sport to witness her final preparations.
Confident, friendly, eager, she talked with some excitement about the prospect of becoming Britain’s most decorated female Olympian. Already tied with the now retired Dame Laura Kenny on six medals, one more success in either the individual or team horse dance event in Paris and she would stand alone as Britain’s best.
“If I achieve that it will be incredible,” she said. “My dream was always just to get to the Olympics. I didn’t think there could be anything more special than that. Then in London, I thought this was not real: first Olympics, home crowd, double gold? Yeah right. Now to think I could be at the very top, how surreal is that? I don’t see it as pressure, though. Like I always do, I just want to go out there and enjoy it, have fun. I mean, it’s not like every person gets to go to an Olympics.”
Now we know Dujardin will not be going to this Olympics. The fun has stopped. The emergence of four-year old video footage – or two, according to the lawyer of the whistleblower – of her abusing a horse, filmed in the very indoor arena in which she was speaking that day, has ended any chance of her participation. Just 72 hours before she expected to be on the Seine with the rest of Team GB at the Opening Ceremony, she was obliged to issue a mea culpa.
“I am deeply ashamed. What happened is completely out of character and does not reflect how I train my horses or coach my pupils, however there is no excuse.”
After the video had been broadcast on national television, it was clear her withdrawal was the only option. It showed her, short tempered and tetchy, thrashing at a horse’s legs as it failed to complete her instructions. This was less horse dance, more animal abuse. As such it was the very worst advertisem*nt for her sport, giving telling evidence for the animal rights activists who have long insisted it is inherently cruel and unnatural.
It would be totally disingenuous, however, to claim the clues were there, that a visit to the yard she shares with her long time coach and mentor Carl Hester was to be confronted by evidence of institutionalised maltreatment. Rather, the place was alive with honking and squawking, barking and neighing. Everywhere you looked there were animals: a couple of peaco*cks wandering through the trees, a gaggle of guinea fowl trotting up the drive, dogs everywhere, all allowed to wander free. Plus horses. Lots of them.
And when Dujardin talked about her horses, she talked of partnership, of mutual understanding, of respect. She rides as many as a dozen a day, and explained as she did so she analysed their character, assessing whether they are up to the job of joining her in competition, talking to each of them constantly. Her conversations, she insisted, are not one way. Rather she reckoned she has developed a process of communication that means there is information coming back all the time.
“I love Pete, he’s very enthusiastic,” she explained of Imhotep, the horse she hoped to ride at the Paris Olympics, who, is not the horse in the video but like all her mounts over the years, she invariably refers to by his nickname. “He’s only 11, quite young, but he seems to take everything in his stride. He is just such a happy horse, loves what he does, not a horse that goes shy or nervous. When we go into the ring, I say, let’s go Pete and he does. He absolutely loves to perform.”
In the several conversations we have had across her time at the top of her sport, this has always been the Dujardin claim: she and her horses are in it together. They love the competition almost as much as she does. Almost.
Because Dujardin is one of the most competitive individuals you could meet. You don’t have the urge to ride for up to six hours a day, six days a week without a thirst for success. When asked if there was any trickery involved in her choreography, she simply smiled: “hard work, nothing more.”
Hester, who first discovered her talents when Dujardin worked as a stable girl at his yard, confirmed her extraordinary drive. When asked who called the shots these days in their training relationship, he rolled his eyes in mock disdain.
“Obviously she does,” he said. “She is the most competitive person I have ever met. When she is waiting to go out into the arena, she’s like: right, bring on the world, I’m going to crush them.”
What the video footage suggests is that when training her horses, Dujardin is inclined to impose on them the same kind of demands she puts on herself. Except of course, for all the Dr Dolittle insistence of mutual understanding, the horses do not speak the same competitive language. Although in her defence, it seems highly unlikely that was the usual way with her. The reason the video exists is because she and Hester record every moment of training, then pore over what they have seen to analyse errors and work on improvements. The fact that just the one moment of loss of temper has emerged suggests it was not routine but a one off.
Even so, as Dujardin recognised in her withdrawal this week, even one moment of such behaviour undermines the very integrity of the sport that made her a serial champion. Dujardin’s tragedy is that, even as she was poised on the very lip of sporting immortality, it was a moment that will come to define her.
