Gracie Catling

She trains without a coach or a string of expensive warmbloods and rocks up in the oldest lorry in the car park. So how has rising star Gracie Catling, 22, just swept the small tour at the Winter Dressage Championships to become the most talked-about young rider in British dressage at the moment?

- WORDS OSCAR WILLIAMS

THE winter championships have long been a proving ground for dressage’s future stars.

The small tour titles Gracie Catling won there this spring have been claimed before her by riders who went on to senior teams and championship medals. So when a 22-year-old takes three of the four on offer — on an 18-year-old gelding once written off as hopeless — people start asking where she came from.

She’d been second five times at the same championships the year before. This year, by her own account, she “added a bit more fight in the belly”. But what the prize-giving photographs don’t show is how unlike the standard pathway hers has been.

“We’ve never bought a horse for me, ever,” she says. “And that still remains the case now.”

Gracie is based at the family yard near Bicester in Oxfordshire — nine boxes, 11 acres, no grooms, no string of warmbloods bought in for the job. There is Gracie, her mother Julia, and a ragtag — but remarkable — band of horses they’ve produced themselves, including part-bred Welsh ponies, Connemaras and, of course, Friesians.

“We’re quite isolated — we paddle our own canoe and do our own thing,” Gracie says. “I think a lot of people wonder how we get the results we do without buying the horses.”

GRACIE’S mother, Julia, a British Dressage judge, didn’t come from an equestrian family but was, in Gracie’s words, “obsessed with horses” from childhood. When she met Gracie’s father, Karl, it was made clear early that if he wanted to go out with her, he would need to learn to ride.

He took to it quickly — team chasing, a bit of eventing — and gave up only when Julia moved into dressage and tried to take him with her. She had, Gracie says, “kind of lost her nerve jumping a bit” once Gracie and her sister came along.