Showjumping stars aiming for hat-trick

A year after five medals were won at Greenwich Park across showjumping, dressage and eventing, the British equestrian team went one better in Herning.

Their six-strong total included three golds – two for Olympic dressage champion Charlotte Dujardin – while the showjumping team added a European title to their London 2012 gold.

With the prodigiously successful British para-dressage squad adding 11 medals – Sophie Christiansen, Natasha Baker and Sophie Wells all claimed title hat-tricks – it delivered a bumper crop of 17 European gongs.

Every rider who competed in Herning left for home with at least one medal and Britain emphatically topped the table, securing more podium finishes than Germany and Holland combined.

“Coming into the championship, there was a real danger of it being a lose, lose situation,” said Connell. “If we did what we did last year with the same horse-rider combinations, people would go ‘you did it last year, of course you should do it this year – it’s a Europeans versus an Olympics’.

“And if we did badly, the doom merchants would be saying ‘woe, it’s all broken’. What has been fantastic has been the rider-horse combinations that were not in the Olympics stepping up to the plate and being part of medal successes. Of course, it was brilliant what Charlotte did – nothing should be taken away from that. She has an unreal talent and a drive that is almost scary.

“But there was also Michael Whitaker coming in and being a counting score in a medal-winning showjumping team, Will Funnell’s brilliant second round in the team showjumping and Ricky Balshaw and Anne Dunham in the paras. It says London was not a flash in the pan and it demonstrates we have the right riders.”

Next on the major championship agenda for Britain’s equestrian teams will be the 2015 World Equestrian Games in France, which also serves as a Rio 2016 Olympics qualifier.

Next month, though, the showjumpers will head to Barcelona for the Nations Cup final, targeting a clean sweep of major titles following their Olympic and European successes.

Attention now switches to the British eventing squad – silver medallists at London 2012 – and the FEI European Championships in Malmo this week.

World No 2 William Fox-Pitt spearheads the British challenge, with his team-mates including former European individual champions Tina Cook and Pippa Funnell.

Britain has won team gold at eight of the last nine European Championships but 2012 Olympic gold medallists Germany will start as favourites, with Sweden and France also expected to mount strong challenges.