Laura Collett and London 52 have had huge success over the past six seasons – three five-star wins, two Olympic team golds, individual Olympic bronze and most recently, individual gold at the European Championships in September.
But it has been a long journey to the top for this pair involving hard graft, a fair share of disappointment and years of developing their partnership.
On the current episode of The Horse & Hound Podcast, sponsored by NAF, Laura talks about the highs and lows of their years together and what has gone into making “Dan” the horse he is today.
The 2019 season was a particularly tumultuous one for the pair.
“I felt a huge amount of pressure surrounding him,” says Laura, looking back at the spring that year. “He was one of the most talked about horses and he went into Bramham Horse Trials off the back of a really good spring campaign. It was kind of, ‘Everyone’s thinking he should go and win and be selected for his first championship.’
“It got to the stage where I felt like I wasn’t good enough to ride such a good horse, so I started riding him defensively, not wanting to make a mistake and not wanting to let him down – and then because I was thinking like that, I actually did the absolute opposite and did let him down.
“He still needed his hand holding. He was very green and inexperienced and going to somewhere like Bramham, he needed me to be 100% confident on him. And I was sitting there thinking, don’t mess it up, don’t let him down and then gave him no really clear instructions.
“So he had a blip. He misunderstood the ditch hedge early on and he sort of got hung up on it. I managed to stay on and carried on. But at the next fence, he was very put off and I think he was actually quite sore, so he stopped at the rail going into the hollow. So I pulled him up because I just felt like we needed to regroup, both of us, and go away and put things back together, which we did.”
Laura then went to Aachen and, in the lead after dressage and showjumping, had a glance-off at the final combination across country.
“I again went very defensive, trying to protect him at the last combination, and I think it just confused him slightly, because I’d been really positive the whole way round,” she says.
“I was kind of shocked then to get the call-up for the Europeans that year. We went to the Europeans and felt like everything again was going really well, until the last water combination, where we ended up upside down in the water.”
“It was three things that went pretty badly wrong and it would have been easy to just put him away and say, ‘You know what, let’s regroup and go again next year.’ But it was actually Pippa Funnell and Tina Cook who said to me, ‘Don’t put him away on the back of what’s happened this year, you need to go and have a really confidence-building run.’”
Laura decided to take Dan back to Boekelo, where he’d run well previously.
“It was very much going there with one aim and one aim only, and that was to have a fun run and a good run,” she says. “We didn’t care about the result. I wasn’t going there to be competitive. I was going there to put the wheels back on.
“And for me, that event was the turning point in his career, because he flew around the cross-country. We both had a ball. It felt like we were back on track. And to top it off, he ended up winning.
“And I remember him standing in the prize-giving – having stood in the prize-giving 12 months before, shaking and thinking he wanted the ground to swallow him up – he stood there like a really proud horse, like he suddenly realised he was as good as I always thought he was. I think that was the point that he decided he loved crowds and never looked back.”
“Let him learn to enjoy it”
What did Laura Collett do with London 52 between the Europeans and Boekelo to set up that result?
She explains: “Pippa said to me, ‘Just go and take him cross-country schooling, just you and him, no pressure. Just let him learn to enjoy it and you learn to enjoy him again.’ And so I took him several times before Boekelo and just almost treated him like a four-year-old, just trotting and popping and letting him realise that not every time he went cross-country was going to be stressful and a big occasion. So it was about letting him just enjoy the job again.
“And even now, I took him cross-country schooling the week before we went to Blenheim, just to make sure that everything was confident. It’s not being afraid to go back to the basics. No matter how good he’s been at an event, I always make sure I go and do that before the next one, so that he doesn’t feel under any pressure. We always put the confidence back in the bank.”
The success Laura Collett and London 52 have had since that Boekelo is true testament to the power of training and building a partnership in horse sport.
“What he’s proved the most is that if you build a partnership and you build trust in that partnership, then anything’s possible, because he absolutely is not the bravest cross-country horse,” she says.
“He’s learned and it’s taken, I would say, really and truly, up until this year, at the age of 16, for me to feel like now I go out on the cross-country and he feels like an absolute machine, whereas there were a good few years where I definitely felt like I had to hold his hand and really reassure him.
“He would have several times on a cross-country course where he felt like he questioned what I was asking him to do, but he only went because he trusted me, and that is what made it so special that he then won a Europeans on his cross-country performance. So that’s something that, as a rider, I’m really proud of.”
Hear more about Laura and London 52’s partnership, from where she found him to what he means to her, on the current episode of The Horse & Hound Podcast.
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