Jessica von Bredow-Werndl and TSF Dalera BB were the superstars in the dressage at Tokyo, ending with an all-the-way victory in the Freestyle…

But it is a victory that taken lots of time, lots of work and lots of people.  Christopher Hector shared the journey when he sat down with Jessica at the Frankfurt Horse show in 2018.

You’ve been a top rider in Germany for quite a long time, but now it seems with Dalera you have gone to an even higher level because of the confidence she gives you…

“I think so too, but I think it is also because my riding has improved. It’s not only the mare, it’s my riding…”

Starting out – Jessica at the Grand Prix Press Conference at Neumünster Show in 2014 after her placing on Unee

I was thinking of Podhajsky’s line – my horses, my teachers…

Jessica and her ‘hardest and best teacher,’ Unee, at the Europeans in 2015.

“Actually my hardest and best teacher so far has been Unee. I’ve learned so much from him, but Dalera feels to me like a horse on a new level, she is a horse with no limits. She is such a dancer, such an easy mover, she is a real rock star in the arena, she wants to present herself, she wants to show how good she is. She loves competing.  She is the most amazing horse I have ever ridden at this level so far.”

Dalera starting out at Grand Prix level, competing in the LouisDor Final for young Grand Prix horses at Frankfurt Show in 2017

Was she easy right from the start?

“No! (the laugh is never far away when you talk to Jessica). When I got her she was already eight years old, she was pretty tense, but already showed a lot of potential and a very good piaffe / passage, not perfect, but you could see that it was going to be good. But she was a bit afraid of the flying changes, so I nearly fell off in the first year, when she was bucking – she was crazy and really afraid of a single flying change.”

What did you do?

“Just relax, never argue, just relax and wait. When it works, you pat her, and if it doesn’t, I ignore it. Just calm her down, I didn’t make a big deal out of it, I just trained it. I also trained many other things, so I didn’t make it for her a big problem. It just developed by itself, by not focusing on it.”

Do you ride her outside the arena – out in the country?

“YES! A lot, I hack out all the horses. This is one of my most important training methods, it’s to have happy athletes. It’s very very very important for me to have happy horses and therefore it is important to give them a lot of different experiences. To hack them out a lot, to ride a lot outside. We have a super cantering track, and they go out in the field every day, even in the winter. Some horses don’t go on the grass field, but still in the paddock in the winter, even when there is snow.”

And you are not very far from snow! (Jessica and her family live at Aubenhausen, in the far south of Germany, almost on the Austrian border – with the Alps a spectacular background to their outside arena. There is a wonderful video on the website https://aubenhausen.de/en/)

“Lots of snow…”

What were the most important things that Unee taught you?

Unee – the teacher

“Unee taught me many things. He was not really motivated when I got him, so he showed me how to motivate a horse properly. That’s like making every day a little bit different, taking care not to train too much all the technique stuff – also to focus on strength and conditioning training. Like for two weeks we would just focus on conditioning training and go on the canter track – no single movement asked. There’s many things he taught me, and also to stay patient and to be in the here and now. You can’t plan, you just have to be in the here and now when you ride him in a test, because every day was a little bit different (It’s that laugh again as Jessica remembers…) I had to learn to feel and be in the here and now.”

What human teachers…

“Many good teachers. The biggest influence in my young time was Stefan Münch, he was very good for juniors and young riders. He took my brother Benjamin and I by the hand through juniors and young riders, he was perfect. He was not only a super coach but also like a best friend – the most perfect trainer we could have had for this tour. At Grand Prix he was not so experienced so he went to another junior / young rider when our ‘era’ ended.”

“We were always seeking, my brother and I, we were always looking for more. We wanted to know more, we were like little sponges, we would try to absorb everything. After finishing school, we started studying, my brother and I, and we went to England for three months with our horses, but not to train there, to learn a little bit of the English language. We went to Emile Faurie, not for training, to get into the language because our school English was so horrible, and it helped just to talk even if you made mistakes.”

“Then we started to think about what we were doing and not only do what we were told to do. I asked Isabell (Werth) – also because we were a little bit lost – if she she could  help us, and she said yes, even though I didn’t expect her to say yes. So I went there with some horses for five years. The longest I stayed there was four weeks, then only for a week every month, or every second month, just to get input. But I never left the horses there, I just went with my horses and then drove back. That’s what I was doing from the age of twenty to twenty five.”

“But these five years were also the most unsuccessful years we have had, not because of Isabell, it was because we had no horses! We really were super up to the age of 21, we managed to bring our under-21 horses to the final of the Piaff-Förderpreis, a series for Under 25-riders, but they would never have been enough to be top Grand Prix horses. So we decided to sell these horses and to invest the money we earned into new horses, young horses, like Zaire, we bought her ten years ago.”

Zaire – not crazy now (Photo – Rebecca Ashton)

“So this was the start of a very long hard time because we had no success, even in the youngsters classes, Zaire, she was crazy when she was young. We were the best in the juniors and young riders, I was three times the individual European champion in a row, and German champion and everything, then we disappeared because we had no horses. We just didn’t know how to find the next generation, we are not from a riders family, my mum was a skier, my father a sailor, but this was probably the most important time of our life because we learnt how to build up young horses, up to Grand Prix.”

What do you think the major things you learnt from Isabell?

“Mainly training techniques. The most important thing I learnt from Stefan Münch was patience, he was such a patient man, he was never loud, he was never unfair to a horse, it was always in a very positive way. It was different with Isabell, she was shouting at me a lot! But one of her riders told me, as long as she shouts at you, she is interested in you. Isabell is an amazing rider and for sure, also an amazing trainer. I’ve learnt so many things from her, just by watching. She’s a genius. She’s the most successful rider ever, and it is hard to beat that, it’s like mission impossible.”

“Also because it was like part time training for my brother and myself, and because we knew we can’t copy her, and we didn’t want to copy her, but we found our own way – more and more in those five years. I also had a time where I wanted to stop riding, when I was twenty five, I was really thinking to stop it, or to reduce it to one or two horses a day. Because after I finished studying, I was also running our fitness centre and this also was fun. And being unsuccessful in riding and pretty successful in running a fitness centre, sometimes you also think about a change.”

“Luckily I met a very good coach, I am still working with him, his name is Holger Fischer, he’s not a mental coach, he’s a life coach, and he just asked me the right questions and pretty soon it was clear to me that I really want to ride. So I stopped working in the gym, and just focused on riding, and gave myself five years, till I was thirty, to give it everything. When I was 28 I was in the German A Squad!”

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Who is teaching you now?

“Jonny Hilberath took over when we started to compete a little bit at the same competitions as Isabell, so it was difficult for her to train us anyway, and she was so far away, and we needed someone to come to our place. That’s why we started to train with Jonny. I have also been training very regularly for the past four years with Morten Thomson.”

“For eight years now, we have been training with Jonny. For fourteen years we have been training with one of the riders from the Spanish Riding School, Andreas Hausberger, he focusses on training the piaffe by hand, but he is also watching us and giving us good advice, he is also a good friend. He was already there when we trained with Stefan Münch, he was there the whole time so he really knows us from the beginning.”

“Also Monica Theodorescu – when Jonny can’t train me at competitions, it’s Monica and when Monica is in Bavaria, she comes to our place and trains us. So we have four trainers at the moment, but my main trainer is my brother, Benjamin.”

Benjamin and Famoso

That’s not hard… no sibling rivalry?

“No, and the older we get, the better it works. He knows it, and I know it, without him I wouldn’t be where I am, and it is the other way round. We really help each other, we really support each other – of course we can also argue like brother and sister, but usually by the next horse we like each other because we need the help with the horse. We are really good friends.”

Ferdinand BB at Frankfurt (Kenneth Braddick photo)

The horse you rode in the Louisdor Preis at Frankfurt in 2018, Ferdinand BB?

“He was just broken in when he came to me, maybe five to ten times someone was sitting on him, then he went to my stable, and it is a pretty funny story, because when he arrived I wanted to ride him on the first or the second day. I took him on the lunge for a little while, then I got on, and he began to run faster and faster and faster, and Benny was filming, and after about five or six rounds of speedy canter, I was shouting, help, HELP! I was so afraid because I didn’t know him, and he didn’t stop, it was horrible. But he calmed down, and I didn’t fall off, and so far I haven’t fallen off him, but he was pretty wild.”

“He was a stallion and we gelded him when he was six years old, so he was quite long a stallion. I am pretty proud because he struggled a bit with some movements for the Grand Prix, but now it turns out that these movements are going to be his strength, this is really cool. He just got the time he needed, but at Frankfurt he showed me it was worth it. When we entered the arena, I felt that he was afraid but pretty soon he was okay, let’s do it. I was really happy with his test, just one big mistake in the extended trot, but I was really happy, it was a sign that he can be another superstar.”

With Unee’s freestyle, you seemed to be referring to issues that are larger than a sixty by twenty arena, you start with the words of Martin Luther King…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Tj4bf5rGE

“To respect all living beings. Actually I am an animal lover, obviously, and I also don’t eat meat. It’s interesting that you asked the question because no one asked that question all the years I was competing that freestyle. It was just a message from the heart that for me it was important, that everyone can respect the others as they are. And especially the animals because the animals have no voice and I think we should take more responsibility for animals, and I can hardly bear the conditions some animals have to live in – just for our use. This is the message I would have loved to have spread more, but it is never too late, and the older I get the more I want to work on this message.”

“At Tokyo, I felt from the very first second to the last the she was 100% with me – listening so well that I had to be careful not to do too much or too little! We didn’t have such a lucky start in the Grand Prix or the Special there, but in the Freestyle we showed that anything is possible and from then on I began believing the Olympic dream could come true”.

Now it has…

Now check out the early Kürs with Dalera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiO077ZxF-o

“I chose the music for Dalera because it is so light, and a message like with Unee, does not fit into this La La Land topic.

And want to watch Jessica celebrate her 33rd birthday with an 89.64 riding Dalera at Neumünster?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0fTuBVKiZs

story ends

Interested in the bloodlines that produced Dalera?  She’s by a son of Gribaldi, the Trakehner sire – who was also the sire of Totilas.  International Horse Breeders has a selection of top European Stallions carrying the line available in Australia – go to www.ihb.com.au and type in Gribaldi. 

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