Dressage-News

STUTTGART, Germany, Nov. 16, 2019–Jessica von Bredow-Werndl and TSF Dalera BB beat Isabell Werth and three-time World Cup champion partner Weihegold OLD to win the German Masters World Cup Grand Prix Freestyle Saturday.

The score of 88.440% for Jessica and the 12-year-old Trakehner mare bested the result of team mate Isabell on Weihegold on 87.240%.

The score for Jessica, 33 years old, and Dalera was second highest only to the 89.107% the pair logged in taking Freestyle bronze at the European Championships in Rotterdam in August, where they also earned gold as a member of the German team.

“She gave me a feeling I’ve never had before!” Jessica said of Dalera that she competed at Small Tour in 2016 before moving to Grand Prix in 2018. “In Rotterdam she was already amazing but today it felt even lighter and easier. Every piaffe was amazing, every transition every passage and pirouette, every half-pass… I’m so excited about our future now!”

A sold-out crowd of 8,000 spectators watched Jessica ride to the music of “La La Land,” that she described as “my heart music. It felt like dancing and I had goose bumps all the time on my ride.”

“It’s really cool to win in Stuttgart, I’ve always dreamed of that!”

Isabell, who has won the freestyle here on nine occasions since it was first staged in 1985, praised Jessica for a “completely deserved” victory but laughed, “this should not be a habit.”

Jessica and Dalera were also on Germany’s gold medal team at the 2018 World Equestrian Games in Tryon then three months later won both the CDI5* Grand Prix and Freestyle in Geneva. Isabell on Emilio was runnerup there.

The scores don’t count for Isabell who has ridden Weihegold to victory in the annual championships at Omaha in 2017, Paris in 2018 and Gothenburg this year, as well as team gold and individual silver at the 2016 Olympics. She has fulfilled the first of two required qualifying events on both Weihegold and Emilio, Weihegold her first choice to defend the title and Emilio as a backup.

The duo’s runnerup placing was only the fourth time not to finish first in 35 starts since the 2016 Rio Games–two of the second places coming as a result of victories by America’s Laura Graves on Verdades.

Helen Langehanenberg on Damsey FRH rounded out the top three places for Germany wih a score of 83.725%, while Germans Dorothee Schneider on DSP Sammy Davis Jr. was fourth on 83.395% and Benjamin Werndl, Jessica’s brother, on Daily Mirror fifth on 80.900%.

The result boosted Jessica into a tie with fellow German Frederic Wandres at the top of the Western European League in the third of 11 qualifiers for a start at the final in Las Vegas next April. Helen Langehanenberg stands third and Benjamin Werndl fourth, but of the nine places reserved for Western Europe at the final of a total of 18 from around the world, a country is limited to three starting places.

The next World Cup event is in Madrid at the end of the month.

Results:

World Cup Grand Prix Freestyle