Sadie Smith

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Sadie Smith is one of the most exciting riders of her generation in British dressage, combining a working-pupil-turned-professional backstory with a career-defining partnership with her home-grown grand prix mare, Swanmore Dantina.

A national champion and a Nations Cup team rider, Sadie represents the possibilities open to riders without significant funding or a horsey upbringing – making it to the top of the sport on grit, talent and the backing of people who believe in her.

Sadie grew up in Southampton to non-horsey parents – “Mum’s petrified of horses” – and got her first taste of riding at a birthday pony party, aged eight.

She started at Quob Stables in Hampshire, working weekends in exchange for lunchtime rides, and began her dressage education after taking on a loan cob/thoroughbred mare who wasn’t good on the flat.

Training with dressage rider Kay Waterman, Sadie was taken to watch the 2005 European Championships at Hagen, where she watched Carl Hester ride Escapado and decided that was what she wanted to do.

Her professional start came with Irish international rider Roland Tong and his partner Ben St John-James, where she lived and worked for four years. It was during that time she won her first national titles – the prelim and novice restricted music – riding Roland’s Ambience IV, and bought the horse who would define her early career, Keystone Dynamite (Mambo). A sharp, character-building chestnut, Mambo tested Sadie daily but ultimately became the first horse she trained to grand prix, finishing fourth at the 2021 National Championships on 71%.

Sadie went on to work at Carl Hester’s yard, where she spent more than five years as one of his riders alongside Charlotte Dujardin – Charlotte having been the one to recommend Sadie to Carl in the first place.

Sadie credits both as transformative influences, learning not only the riding and training that shaped her into the grand prix rider she is today, but also how horses should be kept and managed.

In late 2021, on Carl’s recommendation, Sadie moved to the Netherlands to work for Anne and Gertjan van Olst, the base of Olympic team medallist Lottie Fry.

Sadie rode top horses and contested stallion performance tests, but struggled with homesickness during the Covid era and returned to the UK, where she rebuilt her career from scratch.

Now based with another former employer, Sarah Tyler-Evans, Sadie runs her own training and competition business with a string of young horses owned by supporters, including Peter Belshaw and Sue Garrard, and long-time backer Steve Readings.

Sadie’s career-defining partnership is with the home-produced mare Swanmore Dantina (Dia), a daughter of Dante Weltino and the national six-year-old champion in 2021. Dia took the prix st georges winter championship in 2023 and both the inter I winter championship and inter II national title in 2024, before Sadie made her senior team debut at the Rotterdam Nations Cup in 2025. The pair were crowned National Champions at the LeMieux National Dressage Championships on a personal-best 77.05% that same year.