Lara de Liedekerke-Meier and Origi. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
One of the predictions that EN editor Sally and I made when we first walked Pierre le Goupil’s Paris Olympics track was that this, almost certainly, was going to be a week in which the “Big Six” eventing nations – the Brits, the Germans, the US, the Aussies, the Kiwis, and France – would finally have their reign of domination threatened by a slew of smaller nations.
That idea didn’t come from a vacuum. Instead, it was the coming-together of a few different threads: more immediately, as we had boots on the Versailles grass, it was a reflection on a 2022 World Championships, which was similarly built at “championship level” – that is, a five-star dressage and showjumping, and a consolidated CCI4*-L cross-country, with more jumping efforts over a shorter distance.
In Pratoni, we saw that slightly lower level of track catch out experienced five-star horses, who had little to back them off; that was most apparent in the team performance of the Brits, who were odds-on by a country mile to win, but didn’t even step onto the podium (though they did, notably, have an individual champion in Yas Ingham, who wasn’t riding for the team, and a very-near podium finish for team riders Ros Canter and Lordships Graffalo).
The course at Versailles didn’t necessarily feel similar; its use of terrain, for one thing, was very different, and it had a lot of flat, turning, wooded areas in comparison to the long pulls of Pratoni’s volcanic hills. But like that World Championships, it walked as a clever but not dimensionally stand-out sort of course, and we began to wonder – could this be the most influential thing about it? And would it, ultimately, best suit horses that had been specifically targeted at Championship pathways via technical four-star courses – a very European approach – rather than those that had run well around Badminton and Burghley?
That was one of the threads. The other, which we’d been following for a long time, was the continued progression of a small handful of the “developing” eventing nations.
Ryuzo Kitajima leads the Japanese portion of the victory lap, quite enthusiastically, on foot. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
There was Japan, who had sprung into contention between the Rio and Tokyo Olympics, with the allocation of a huge amount of funding from the Japan Racing Association (a spate of big-ticket horse purchases on the run-up to Tokyo saw the JRA spending, allegedly, €1.25 million apiece on a selection of already well-known campaigners) and the relocation of several talented riders from their home nation to the UK to train under some of the sport’s most experienced coaches.
There were also discipline reallocations: Kazuma Tomoto was a top-level showjumper, but was told just after Rio that the country had enough riders in that discipline ahead of their Tokyo campaign, but needed more eventers. Could he switch? Would he be willing to leave his wife and their young child at home in Tokyo for years to base himself abroad and focus fully on becoming a medal contender?
Over the course of the last seven years ago, he and his fellow UK- and European-based Japanese riders have been making themselves a force to be reckoned with as individuals, and team success was sure to follow at some point. It didn’t, alas, come off on their home soil in 2021, though Kazu himself came achingly close to the podium with his fourth place finish. They managed to secure support for the next Olympic cycle, but when they initially failed to qualify as a nation in last year’s Asian and Oceania qualifier at Millstreet, nor at the World Championships the year prior, much of it fell away again.
Theirs is the redemption story of this Games, and one we’ll be diving into in much more detail soon: they were awarded a retroactive qualification after China lost their team space at the end of last season, and spent the next few months battling to get the wheels back on the bus and their heads in the right place after a tough, demoralising year. They rallied, they fought, they resecured support and funding and some new horses, too, and they trained, constantly and consistently.
This season, their results crept up and up and up, culminating in a superb finish for all four riders at the selection trial at Bramham CCI4*-S. And in Paris, they once again faced a setback and then got the job done: after the withdrawal of Ryuzo Kitajima and Cekatinka at the final horse inspection, they slipped from bronze position to fifth, but then clawed their way back up with three clear showjumping rounds that overcame that 20-penalty substitution fee to become bronze medallists. Theirs is the second medal ever won by Japan in any discipline, and the first in eventing – the previous came at the 1932 LA Olympics, where Baron Takeishi Nishi was the Olympic champion in showjumping.
Their system can be distilled to this: advantageous matches and total immersion over a period spanning the better part of a decade. They’ve taken on excellent horses, paired them with riders showing great promise, and then thrust those riders into established European systems operating at the top level, and over time, the confluence of all those elements has created a squad of athletes well-accustomed to competing against, and triumphing in the company of, the very best in the world. That total immersion will have played no small part in each rider’s ability to maintain their own focus and programme in those wild hinterlands between not qualifying for, and ultimately qualifying for, the Paris Games.
Japan feels like a necessary jumping-off point when we talk about the success of developing nations at this year’s Olympics, but it’s also important to point out that they’ve sat on the cusp of being major players for a long time: in Tokyo, their aim to win a medal wasn’t an outlandish one, even if it didn’t come off in the end. They certainly had more setbacks to overcome this time, but they also had several years’ more mileage competing at the top levels in good company, and that longevity and dogged commitment to their now well-established systems is what allowed them to make this result happen. And what a result it is; just twelve years ago in London, none of Japan’s riders completed the cross-country, though Yoshi Oiwa made history when leading after the dressage. Now, they can follow through.
Felix Vogg and Dao de l’Ocean. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Beyond them, though, we’ve seen a remarkable week of competition for several nations that truly do fit the “developing” bracket. Switzerland has been on an upward track for the last five years or so, and it’s one that can be traced back to their appointment of Andrew Nicholson as cross-country coach en route to Tokyo. There’s always been talent in spades in the country, but something shifted drastically when Nicholson stepped into his role: they learned how to progress forward from their habit of riding slowly, carefully, and defensively at team competitions, in the hope of simply completing, and instead take calculated risks and ride positively and, as such, competitively.
At Tokyo, the Swiss finished tenth of 15 teams, in part because of the non-completion of cross-country of Robin Godel and Jet Set. But the performances were demonstrably on the up and up: both Mélody Johner and Toubleu de Rueire and Felix Vogg and Colero finished in the top 20, giving both the team itself and its observers the feeling that a competitive placing at the global level was well within reach.
Just weeks later, the Swiss team at the 2021 FEI European Eventing Championships at Avenches finished fourth of thirteen nations on home turf. They were just one penalty from bronze. Their 2022 season began well, too; they were victorious, both as a team and individually for Robin Godel, at the first Nations Cup leg of the year, which was also the test event for the World Championships at Pratoni.
And when that rolled around in September, they didn’t finish on the podium, but they did accomplish something huge: they finished seventh of the sixteen teams, earning themselves direct qualification for the Paris Olympics. En route to Tokyo, they’d qualified in the last possible opportunity, using accumulated Nations Cup series points to scrape into the roster. Now, they were secure in the first round of qualifications.
Switzerland’s Mélody Johner and Toubleu de Rueire cross the pontoon in front of the Chateau de Versailles on a thrilling day of cross-country at the Paris Olympics. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Last year’s tough European Championships at Haras du Pin gave Switzerland the chance to test its mettle over a course designed by Paris designer Pierre Le Goupil, and team manager Dominik Berger opted to send a line-up that was very nearly the same one we’d ultimately see at the Games. Felix Vogg, who’d become Switzerland’s first five-star winner in over fifty years in 2022, helmed the team with Colero (he’d do the same at Paris, though with young gun Dao de l’Ocean); Mélody Johner and her evergreen Toubleu de Rueire once again occupied a banker role, delivering a reliable clear; Robin Godel and Grandeur de Lully CH put another smart three-phase performance on the board, even if underperforming slightly on the flat; and eventual Paris travelling reserves Nadja Minder and Toblerone jumped a classy double clear. The team finished fifth.
Now, they’re fifth place finishers again, this time at the Olympics, beating Big Six nations including Australia, Germany, the USA, and New Zealand. They came into the final phase in bronze medal position; though rails ultimately dropped them out of it, their finishing score saw them just three poles off of the podium. For context, there was three poles between gold and silver, and another three between silver and bronze, so those margins aren’t to be quibbled with.
Switzerland came good at Paris thanks to that concentrated four years of exactly the right kind of focused training – and their achievement, and that step-by-step, piece-by-piece, absolutely undeniable upward climb becomes more remarkable when it’s put into a broader Olympic context. At Paris, they were fifth; at Tokyo, they were tenth; before then, you have to go all the way back to Atlanta in 1996 to find them even fielding a team at a Games. On that occasion, too, they finished tenth. The country’s only Olympic medals came in 1960, where they took team silver and individual bronze; now, as they look ahead to LA, they can do so with a long-term plan in mind to add to that list of hardware.
Team Belgium celebrates a stellar test from pathfinder Karin Donckers. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
The greatest fairytale of the week, though, is that of team Belgium. Longtime readers of EN won’t be surprised by this finish; we’ve spent plenty of airtime on the Belgians over the last few years, predicting an upward trajectory that felt sure to come. And come it did, on the biggest stage of them all: the all-female trio of Lara de Liedekerke-Meier, Karin Donckers, and Tine Magnus finished fourth, less than two rails from the bronze position, having flitted on and off the podium throughout that hugely influential final phase. In doing so, they became the highest-placed all-female team in Olympic eventing history; they also proved just how effective the system they’ve been developing over the last four years really is.
Let’s rewind a bit. The last time we saw Belgium field a team at the Olympics was at London 2012, where the finished tenth; back in those days, there wasn’t really much of a system at all, and certainly not a throng of supporting trainers around the team. Instead, each rider was in charge of working with their own horses, with their own trainers, and then bringing their results to the world stage and hoping it all came together in something like cohesion. Often, it didn’t; as a result, Belgium has just one Olympic eventing medal to their name – a team bronze in Antwerp in 1920.
But since the appointment of Kai Steffen Meier four years ago, there’s been a total overhaul. Gone is the wilderness non-system of ‘old’ Belgium; instead, the former top-level competitor for Germany has brought the best of his home nation’s much more regimented approach into how the Belgian system operates. Now, there’s a fleet of support professionals – coaches for each phase, a small army of people dedicated to keeping horses in top condition and riders firing on all cylinders, too.
The team now trains together, though it’s been an adjustment process to convince them all to leave home and travel to camp to do so – but after two initial years of settling in and bedding down, we’ve begun to see the fruits of Kai’s labours over the last two seasons. And when that trajectory began, it moved really, really fast.
Belgium went from a country that scrambled and faltered and fell out of contention at championships to one that could perform well enough to qualify directly for the Games, as they did at the European Championships last year, and then, to one that could reasonably be expected to put in a medal-contention performance. In the meantime, they scored their first-ever five-star win, thanks to team leader Lara de Liedekerke-Meier, at Luhmühlen in June, and they began, so compellingly and so clearly, to believe in themselves. The force of that self-belief has been extraordinary.
And now? Now, they can reasonably be expected to take a medal at next year’s European Championships, if they go ahead, and in the longer term, they should absolutely be aiming for success at the 2026 World Championships and the 2028 Olympics.
Lara de Liedekerke-Meier and Origi. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
“When I went out of the arena, I thought someone died,” laughs Lara, moments after her showjumping round in the team decider at Paris. She’d just had an uncharacteristic rail with young star Origi; that, added to a rail apiece for Karin Donckers and Tine Magnus, had pushed them into fourth place from the bronze medal position they’d had a light grasp on in the latter stages of the competition.
“They all looked so disappointed, and I was like, ‘I mean, just to remind you, we just finished fourth at the Olympic Games!’ When, ten days ago at our media day, I said ‘we’re going to go for top five,’ they all looked at me like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, this one, she’s still on her cloud nine!’” she continues with a grin. “And for sure, they’re all disappointed because all these horses are super jumpers. But fourth, I mean, come on! We were so close! Sometimes it just works out this way. Fourth, I mean, we have to be happy with that. I think it’s going to give so much more vision of eventing in Belgium worldwide.”
Tine Magnus and Dia van het Lichterveld Z. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
That, she continues, is hugely important – both Belgium becoming more visible as an eventing nation to the wider world, and the vision of its continued success becoming more widespread to the riders within it.
“We’re a little country, and we overtook Switzerland, which is also a small nation – so the smallest nations were the closest,” she muses. “But I know I’m really, really happy, and I think all three of us did a really good job. I think I picked up the best horse I could to bring the three of us here and that was a wonderful result, even though I’m disappointed in my rail.”
One person shred Lara’s high expectations for a competitive finish in Paris – her husband, and chef d’equipe, Kai Steffen Meier.
“I think Kai wanted a medal. But I don’t think he said it like that, because obviously it would sound a bit arrogant!” says Lara. “But it’s always, when you come to the Olympic Games, either you’re really an amateur who just wanted to go or you dream of a medal, so we shouldn’t be afraid to say that we were dreaming about a medal. Were we close? Yes. Did we have luck [on cross-country]? A little bit. But that’s why we do this sport in general, because sport is not about just being a robot and just executing what you have to do. He just asked us to do our best and to perform the best we could as individuals, and then bring everything we can into the team. I think that’s what we did.”
With Paris behind them – Lara went on to finish 13th individually with the expressive ten-year-old Origi, while Belgian stalwart Karin Donckers was 16th with Leipheimer van’t Verahof in her seventh Olympics, and high-flying chicory-farmer-slash-eventer Tine Magnus was a top thirty finisher with her impressive Dia van het Lichterveld Z, also a ten-year-old. That’s two horses who’ll be 14 and just reaching their peak at LA, and one who will be seventeen, but is a full brother of Fletcha van’t Verahof, who continued to shine at championships with Karin when he was older than that. It’s an incredibly promising foundation, and one that Lara says needs to act as the building blocks for creating strength in depth over the next four years.
Karin Donckers and Leipheimer van’t Verahof. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
“I think Karin won’t give up, which is good because she’s sharp and she keeps me on my toes. I hope we’ll bring more upcoming riders to fight for this in LA because it’s like in England – the more there are, the better you have to be. And there is more in Belgium, just sometimes they don’t know [they’re capable]. The lack of professionalism is not letting them know that they’re good enough. So I’m confident that we can make it. Obviously, if we will repeat that [result] again, it will already be good enough. But we don’t have to be afraid. We can ride and we want to go in and grab those results.”
A nod, too, must go to sixth-place finishers Sweden, who are finally translating their consistency at Nations Cups to championship prowess. Their strengths – fast, consistent, reliable cross-country horses and riders, and good-jumping partnerships – were well-evidenced in Paris, and they’d actually have finished ahead of the Swiss had Sofia Sjöborg and Bryjamolga van het Marienshof Z, the first to come home inside the time, not been awarded a contentious 15 penalties for a flag at 21ABCD, where so many were awarded penalties, launched appeals, and were roundly dismissed.
Frida Andersen and Box Leo. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
The only thing standing in Sweden’s way now is the first phase, and that’s something they’ve long been aware of. It’s no easy feat to be part of the Swedish system; though it’s very well-led by chef d’equipe Fred Bergendorff, it also has to function across a number of borders, because its riders are based in Sweden, in Germany, in the UK, and scattered, essentially, across the continent. Individual systems become hugely important; team-wide weaknesses are, then, harder to address. But if each of these talented riders can find a way to shore up their systems and their training in the first phase, Sweden’s moment to play for a podium finish will come around, and it’ll come around fast.
While the Netherlands finished tenth as a team and feel a couple of steps behind their neighbours in Belgium, where finding their groove is concerned, they proved just how much talent they have at home in the Low Country while in Paris. That was crystallised by an excellent showing from Janneke Boonzaaijer, who finished on her dressage score of 31.9 to take ninth place with longtime partner ACSI Champ de Tailleur. That makes her the first Dutch rider ever to make the time at the Olympics, and the first ever to finish on their dressage score.
It’s a timely reminder to her compatriots in orange that, despite difficulties securing ownership and funding in the small nation, they do have what it takes, and it can happen. Time will tell if that will have an effect on the riders and their system – and, indeed, their self-belief – but we’ve watched it happen so powerfully with other nations that perhaps the Netherlands’ star will be the next to rise.
Whatever may happen in LA’s final standings, Paris left all of us with an important lesson to take away: no matter how small a nation is, its riders, its teams, its chefs and trainers, must never, ever be afraid. To innovate, to change their tactics, to reimagine how structures can work, and above all, to dream.
