Dressage-News

July 21, 2025

By KENNETH J. BRADDICK

After a fruitless search in Western Europe for a warmblood he could afford, Justin Verboomen had given up and gone to Portugal looking for a Lusitano as a fallback. But out of luck again he was having a farewell dinner with friends before heading back home to Belgium.

“Maybe I have a warmblood for you,” one friend suggested. “So we went to see him just before we had to take the plane.”

The warmblood he saw was a two-year-old stallion named Zonik Plus, out of the Dutch team stallion Glock’s Zonik by a Hohenstein mare.

Zozo, as Zonik has since been nicknamed in the barn, was “everything I was searching for–short in the back, with energy, sensitive, beautiful, with good gaits… he was really impressive. So I knew when I saw him that he was my horse.

“Maybe it was the perfect one for me but not for the other people because they sold me the horse for not a crazy amount of money.

“He was really the horse I was dreaming for since I was a kid. So I think you also can feel that.”

He showed just how Zonik by the age of nine had become his equestrian partner and a prospective champion at the mecca of horse sports, the World Equestrian Festival in Aachen, Germany.

Their competition record had already drawn attention–Belgium’s champion at both six and seven years old, placing sixth at age six in the World Young Horse Championships, an achievement Justin calls “really a big thing for him and me.”

Since moving to Big Tour seven months before Aachen, the pair had won six of 10 CDI starts–six at home in Belgium. Justin’s previous international Grand Prix record with three different horses was skimpy.

And no dressage rider from Belgium had ever stood on the medals podium in the history of the Olympics, World and European Championships or a World Cup Final.

By the time Justin and Zonik completed their Aachen competition, they had led Belgium to reserve champion to the winning German team that included Paris Olympic gold medal combinations of Isabell Werth on Wendy de Fontaine and Frederic Wandres on Bluetooth OLD at Grand Prix in the CDIO5* Nations Cup.

Then, the Belgian duo won both the Grand Prix Special with 80.745% and the Freestyle on 89.400%. Isabell and Wendy were runners-up in both competitions, with the crowd of more than 6,000 spectators giving the combination a standing ovation.

Justin and Zonik Plus thus became Dressage Champion of Aachen, the title that was created seven decades earlier and has been won by Isabell Werth 15 times, most recently on Wendy in 2024.

Isabell Werth made clear the competition was great for dressage.

“It was great sport and the strong competition makes it spicy. That is the reason I am still here. I saw Justin in Lier (Belgium) and it was clear to me that he wouldn’t try to be a gentleman. That is what we love to have: exciting sport and competitive shows. That is what the spectators love.”

CHIO Aachen Head of Sport, Birgit Rosenberg, saw the impact as greater.

“The big winner today is the sport. We received a lot of criticism in the run-up. You gave the answer to that today. We saw super pictures, super horses. Thank you to you all, your teams your grooms they all work so hard behind the scenes. I think today was a foretaste of what we will see next year at the World Championships.” The championships will be staged at Aachen.

Justin credits both Larissa Pauluis on Flambeau and Flore de Winne on Flynn FRH, on Belgium’s 2024 Olympic team, for their efforts with limited budgets raising the country’s dressage profile.

More immediately, the Belgian combination plan for the European Championships in Crozet, France in a month’s time, the first senior championship for the rider who will be 38 years old. The typically powerful squads from Germany are expected to include Olympians Isabell on Wendy and Frederic on Bluetooth as well as Katharina Hemmer on Denoix PCH, while Britain will likely have Carl Hester on Fame and Becky Moody on Jagerbomb. Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour on Mount St. John Freestyle may represent Denmark as they did in Paris while Sweden’s Patrik Kittel has more than one horse to choose for selection.

Justin’s English is what he describes as “really bad” and, not surprisingly for a rider from a nation that in the past rarely made a significant impact in international dressage, he’s not well practiced in dealing with the media.

But what appears as shyness and lack of hoopla but with a streak of stubborness seems irrelevant when witnessing what is way more than just a connection between rider and horse, more like a couple that not only can read each other’s minds but instinctively are on identical wave lengths.

In an interview with DRESSAGE-NEWS.com, Justin explained that his father was a riding teacher who was a jumper and eventing rider but later focused on classical dressage. He spent a lot of time at the stables.

“I received my first pony when I was seven with my twin sister,” he said, and laughingly added, “she stopped because the pony was three and she was more on the ground than on the pony.

“I was really into dressage since the beginning. I did a little bit of jumping, of course, but after I decided at about 10 I think I’m sensitive and I really liked dressage because the partnership with the horse and the sensitivity.”

At first, he was riding more Lusitano horses.  His first competitions were the Iberian Masters, an experience be describes as “really nice for me because I was a little bit anxious and not self-confident. Still now it’s difficult but it was really like a big family so I have really good memories there.”

Justin explained what led to finding Zonik.

“First I wanted a warmblood so I was searching in Germany, Holland and in Belgium but I didn’t find anything,” he said.  “I was thinking, ‘OK so I will buy a Lusitano, I will go to Portugal,’ and at the end of the day we saw a few horses.” Again without success.

“I met friends at a restaurant and one of these friends told me, ‘maybe I have a warmblood for you’. So we went to see him just before we had to take the plane.”

Of the horse he saw: “Everything I was searching for–short in the back, with energy, sensitive, beautiful, with good gaits, and he was really impressive. Even at 2, 2 1/2 he was really impressive. So I knew when I saw him that he was my horse.”

Initially when arriving at a show, Zonik is a little bit hot, tense, “a really big personality,” is the way Justin explains it. But the stallion that is bred when not competing is getting better.

“I know this horse is special, really special since the beginning,” he said, “and I always believed that it could do that one day. So I just was trying to stay strong and focus and he never disappointed me, never, since we started the Grand Prix.

“I think he’s a special horse and really sensitive.. and me too. So we found each other. And I was respecting him a lot in the way we were working together and letting him also be himself, because he was hot, he liked to show. So I think we developed a partnership, a real partnership during all those years.”

When Justin goes to the stables, “I think, ‘oh my gosh, he’s so beautiful,’ every morning since I have him. He likes a lot to be scratched, but he can really talk when we scratch him. He likes all the treats, that’s for sure; carrots, sugar, the lot.

“But he’s really sensitive and we have to respect his space and his way, the way he behaves sometimes. I have to respect and don’t force him, don’t impose too much things, because he can be really sensitive and special. Not in a bad way.

“I think he was like that since the beginning, but it’s really the way I think I was respecting him. I allowed him to stay himself, and not put him in a system. Every time I’m on his back, I’m trying to find the best way, the good feeling, the positions where he feels the most comfortable. And he can feel that he trusts me, I think, because I’m never imposing on him.”

And although Zonik is his top mount now, he said he has a five-year-old that he feels “really the same kind of mindset and I couldn’t imagine because it’s a stallion also that I bought when he was six months and until three he was in the field, at my place. And I was thinking, ‘OK, it’s nice, but not that much, you know. Let’s see’.

“And when I rode him, I felt directly also something special. With even more character than Zozo. But he is definitely something special. He’s so smart. He understands everything so fast. And he’s also a fighter.”

Justin said he will wait until after the Europeans to decide whether he will seek to qualify Zonik for the World Cup Final in Fort Worth, Texas next April.