July 13, 2026
Fifty years separates the youngest and oldest dressage riders scheduled to compete at the World Championships in Aachen, Germany in a month’s time.
The half century and geographically a world apart separates Rowena Weggelaar who will be 21 years old when she starts on the Dutch team and Mary Hanna will be 71 when she rides for Australia.
Rowena whose birthday is two weeks before that of Mary’s, will be riding Don Quichot, the gelding she started riding as a junior 4 1/2 years ago and is now aged 18.
She rode the horse in the European Junior Championships in 2022, the Europeans for Young Riders the following year then the Under-25 division until beginning as an international senior in 2025. First she was on the Netherlands’ teams at Nations Cups in Rotterdam and Aachen then a month later competed on her country’s fourth-placed team at the senior Europeans.
Mary Hanna, located near Melbourne, Australia about 10,250 miles/16,500km from Aachen, rode in her third of six Olympics the year Rowena was born.
In an international career with 14 different horses, Aachen will be her seventh World Championship plus six World Cup Finals and a European Championship on one of the rare occasions non-Europeans could compete.
At Aachen, she will ride Ivanhoe, the 13-year-old Dutch-bred gelding that she competed at the 2025 World Cup Final.
