Carl Hester to compete in 7th Olympic Games

UPDATE: Carl just won a bronze medal in Paris for the Great Britain 2024 dressage team. 

Dressage master Carl Hester is headed to his SEVENTH Olympics competition in Paris later this month. As such, he will be among the oldest athletes competing (Hester turned 57 a few days ago). When he was on the Great Britain dressage team that took gold at the 2012 Olympics in London, he was the sole "out" gay athlete representing GB. The home crowd was best pleased. Team Great Britain had never before won a gold medal in dressage. He was subsequently named a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE).

When Carl Hester (b. 1967 in Cambridgeshire, England) decided to take up the sport of dressage in the early 1980s, he was already a natural. Only 18 months after he began training for the sport, Hester won the National Young Rider Championship (1985) as a teenager. He quickly landed on the British Young Rider team in 1988, and he hasn’t looked back.

At the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Carl and Escapado (his horse) placed higher than any other Briton – the same thing at the 2005 European Championships, where the pair ended up in 6th place. On the run up to the 2007 European Championships, Carl was injured and had to back out at the last minute. Bad luck continued into 2008. His two promising horses for Beijing’s Olympic Games, Lecantos and Dolendo, both suffered injuries, so he missed competing.

Hester was soon given an opportunity to ride a new horse, Liebling, and the two formed a quick, strong bond and won an international grand prix. A host of other great results would lead the British team to select Carl for the European Dressage Championships in 2009. Carl’s riding helped Team GB win a silver medal in that event, and he would repeat those results a year later with another silver medal.

The 2012 Olympic dressage gold medal was won with his champion horse "Uthopia." Hester's GB dressage team also won a silver Olympic medal at Rio in 2016 and a bronze at Tokyo 2021. Currently there are plans to make a biopic film of his life story, produced by UK-based filmmakers Drew Curtis and Richard Conway.

Hester will mount "Fame" (photo below), a horse with whom he first competed last year, for the Paris Olympics dressage team events to be held at the Palace of Versailles July 27-August 6, 2024.