FRY DELIGHT

Little Lottie steps into the big time and produces a show for the Gods

A NEW RIDER wrote her name into the fabric of British equestrian l ore yesterday, with a debut Olympic performance which puts her and the Team GB team in with a shot at glory, just when they most needed that lift.

Lottie Fry was the unknown quantity in the British trio also comprising Charlotte Dujardin — aiming for a fourth Olympic gold this week — and Carl Hester, riding his sixth Olympics. Her teammates desperately needed the 25-year-old to star because this is a team in transition. Its young horses have barely any experience of flying, let alone making the 18-hour journey to Tokyo on a cargo plane.

Du jar din’ s beloved gel ding Valegro has retired. Hester and his gelding En Vogue have just two internationals behind them, as do Dujardin and gelding Gio, who go today in the Grand Prix event which dictates who will appear in the team and individual finals.

Fry did not blink. She is a diminutive rider, who is was dwarfed by her stallion Everdale. But her coolness under pressure, on a day when the Tokyo heat clearly affected British archers and shooters, saw her through an impeccable routine.

Fry topped the first group of ten Grand Prix dressage riders with a winning score of 77.096 which had been matched by only four others overall by the end of competition yesterday. For Hester, at 54 the oldest member of the entire Team GB team, Fry’s success resonated particularly deeply. The young rider’s mother, Olympian dressage competitor Laura Fry who died at the age of 45 in 2012, was his close friend.

‘I obviously think about her mum because she was my friend and if there’s a God, you just hope Laura is watching her,’ Hester said last night after posting a score of 75.124 which put him third in his own group of riders.

The focus ahead of this week had been on Dujardin, aiming to match cycling’s Laura Kenny as Britain’s most successful Olympian of all time by taking another gold, and to some in British circles Fry is relatively unknown. She has lived and trained in the Netherlands.

‘If Laura were alive Lottie would never have gone to Holland,’ added Hester. ‘She would have stayed at home and this [Olympics] has given her an amazing opportunity.

‘Lottie’s a tiny little person who can barely pick up a saddle and yet she gets on that horse and rides it like that. I rode that horse when he was young and he was wild — a wild stallion — yet they have just a very good relationship.’

The challenging moments in Hester’ s ride revealed the challenges of working with a horse which is unfamiliar with the territory and Olympic competition. Like the other British horses En Vogue had been given time to recover after the 18-hour flight from Liege, in Belgium to Tokyo with 35 other European horses. But he seemed edgy.

There was a disconcerting moment when Hester saw his attempt to coax action out of the horse with the faintest leg prompt caused a reaction. But the two otherwise performed in line with expectations.

It was Fry’s display, a stylish blend of power and style, which exceeded them, as she outscored Hester. ‘He definitely knew it was a big occasion,’ she said of her own horse. ‘He’s been concentrated the whole day. He’s so intelligent and as soon as he went in the arena he was concentrating on me so hard and then he got such a shock that there were people watching him.

‘He was so focused on me. I’ve been riding him since he was seven, for five years now. We’ve grown up together.’

Hester said Fry’s riding was bold. ‘She’s not shy about going for it,’ he said of her. ‘Dressage is supposed to look easy but to make it look powerful and easy is the bit that most people find difficult. We can almost rely on everybody now. You don’t have to think: “Thank God we’ve got Charlotte [ Dujardin].” And that’s what we’ve tended to think.’

Yesterday’ s top performer Jessica von Bredow-Wernl is leading a formidable German team here. They are certainly the ones to beat for Britain. But Hester is hopeful.

‘ We will be disappointed if we don’t win something,’ he said. ‘That would be the icing on the cake.’