Dressage's Christmas home

Britain's only top-level dressage show, London International is the sport’s festive highlight. Oscar Williams tells its story and speaks to Richard Davison about its early days

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IT'S hard now to imagine the British dressage calendar without the London International Horse Show (LIHS). For many, it sits alongside a summer championship in importance, and for riders and fans alike, it has become a pre-Christmas pilgrimage: bright lights, top horses and that unmistakable indoor buzz.

Yet dressage at London is a relatively recent story. The World Cup leg is celebrating only its 21st birthday, and its existence is the result of a well-timed breakfast, a shared vision, and a fair bit of trial and error – elastic, clapometers and all.

Long before the show became a dressage hotspot, World Cup action briefly lived elsewhere in Britain. “In 1996, Horse of the Year Show [HOYS] had a World Cup qualifier,” recalls Richard Davison, who, as well as being a frequent competitor in London, sits on the organising committee behind the scenes. “I was second in it. And then for some reason, HOYS never followed it up. They didn’t want it the next year, so we stopped having one in the UK.”

That lone 1996 qualifier – ultimately won by Canada’s Penny Rockx and Winsome – has since passed into dressage folklore, amid rumours of tape-tampering, a favourite’s dramatic elimination, heated ringside exchanges with the judges, and a crowd that swung from cheers to boos in minutes. But that’s a tale for another day...

THROUGH the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s, British fans caught only the odd glimpse of top-level dressage in the capital. Even then, it was more a special guest than a regular fixture.

The first outing at LIHS came in 1991, when Jennie Loriston-Clarke and Annie MacDonald Hall won a pas de deux against Monica Theodorescu and Sven Rothenberger. After that, dressage surfaced only in bursts: a tinsel-draped display, a one-off showcase, the occasional masterclass squeezed between the jumping and Christmas fun.