Dressage-News

Feb. 8, 2022

By KENNETH J. BRADDICK

As riders prepare for the world championships this summer, Adrienne Lyle on Salvino and Steffen Peters on Suppenkasper could enhance already historic performances as the only two American partnerships to have ever earned silver medals at both global championships and Olympics.

The two combinations are aiming for a place on the United States team for the world championships Herning, Denmark in August a year after the delayed Tokyo Games and four year after the World Equestrian Games in Tryon, North Carolina by becoming one of about eight rider and horse pairs to go to Europe after the Florida and California winter circuits. Olympic team mate Sabine Schut-Kery on Sanceo is in Wellington also on the same schedule.

In  their first competitions since the Olympics, Steffen is scheduled to compete Suppenkasper at Desert Dressage in Thermal, California next week while Adrienne and Salvino will come out a week later in the CDI5* in the first international dressage show in more than a decade at Palm Beach International Equestrian Center’s Winter Equestrian Festival grounds.

The United States won their only previous Olympic silver in London in 1948 while the only previous world championship team silver was in Spain in 2002.

Before Tryon, the only previous Olympic and world championship squads on which Adrienne and Steffen competed together was at the London Games in 2012, Adrienne on Wizard and Steffen on Ravel, and the 2014 worlds in Normandy, Adrienne on Wizard and Steffen on Legolas. Neither event produced medals for America.

The two were next together in Tryon in 2018, then in Tokyo in 2021.

Did Adrienne, mentored throughout her career by Debbie McDonald, herself a rider on the 2002 World Games silver medal team, see herself as a double silver medalist on the same horse, the Hanoverian stallion owned by Betsy Juliano.

“No,” says Adrienne, 37, “not at all.

“I have to stop and think to myself, ‘Is this really happening?’

“It’s the thing you sort of dream in your head. It’s pretty amazing when it actually works out.

“I feel with the Olympics, the further you get away from it and the more you have a chance to reflect… it’s amazing in the moment but the farther you get away and you hear stuff like that and its: ‘Holy cow! That was us. We did that! Salvino did that, not some horse you’re hearing about, a statistic’. We actually did that. It’s amazing. Then you walk in there and he’s all cute and cuddly and right there, and he did that. So awesome.

“The most amazing thing is we’re just surrounded by really good people, people who train in a way that agrees with our philosophy, owners that agree with that philosophy. So it’s just a nice community to be in.

“It’s amazing to be successful doing it the way you think it should be done. It’s great. Not just the fact that you’re successful, but the way you can go to bed every night and say: ‘These horses are trained, taken care of and brought along I think in my heart they should be’.”

Meantime, Adrienne is scheduled to ride Nexolia’s Glenn S & S in the Global Dressage Festival Intermediate II national competition this week, the first show outing for Adrienne and the 11-year-old KWPN gelding that is the successor-in-training to Salvino.

Preparations for Glenn’s Big Tour career will closely follow that implemented for Salvino–“If we get him to a CDI this season, great,” Adrienne said. “If not, there’s no rush.”

The next Olympics are 2 1/2 years away in Paris.

Part 2: Steffen Peters on Suppenkasper–better than before Olympics