performance in the kind of way that is needed for success on this stage. He will not know when it’s all or nothing; he will not fight with all he has left in the decisive moment. He will not unfold magically in a way that touches the audience. He lacks that “something special.” And this horse would demand too little in return from Isabell Werth.
Isabell loves and, in fact, needs those horses that, amongst riders, are referred to as “hot.” She tends to load up on a kind of mental electricity, to work herself into a state of fervor that matches the horse. The hotter her horses, the more impressive their performances together—it is almost to the point where everything falls apart, where Isabell can no longer reach them, and where they lapse into complete hysteria due to pure overeagerness. This is the major challenge for a world-class dressage rider. She must work along this fine line. Every competitive outing is a borderline experience, where the genius of the horse threatens to turn into insanity at any moment. There, on the brink, is where the competitor who is Isabell Werth feels most comfortable. These moments do not leave her paralyzed with fear. She savors them like an acrobat does when waiting to drop from the very top of the circus tent. She draws her own energy from them.
Besides, Isabell does not see her goal as reaching the top as smoothly as possible. Every step needs to have something special. The way she gets there is even more important than getting there: Her pursuit is the art of bringing the most different, and sometimes difficult, of horses beyond their weaknesses to optimal performance.
Isabell’s parents are constantly amazed by their daughter.
“She will look at a day-old foal,” her father Heinrich says, “and will pretty much tell you where his career path will take him.”
As a farmer, he finds this ability especially impressive.
Or consider the story of Amaretto: The poor horse was technically the next “Crown Prince,” the one to follow in Gigolo’s footsteps, but he was not healthy. Frequent colics tortured the gelding so often that, finally, he had to be taken to live at a veterinary clinic. Whenever she was not on the road competing, Isabell visited him whenever she could, observing her horse in his medical stall for hours, standing next to him and trying to figure out how she could possibly help him. After some time, she took Professor Bernhard Huskamp, the head of the clinic, aside and said: “Whenever Amaretto pulls up his lips and curls them, that is when the next colic episode is about to announce itself.” The veterinarian ignored her at first, then began to wonder, and finally took a chair himself and sat down in Amaretto’s stall for a few hours. He discovered that Isabell was right. Whenever Amaretto pulled up his lips in a certain kind of way, another colic was about to begin and the horse would lie down soon after.
Her father, the experienced farmer, just said, “You simply cannot learn something like that.”
Isabell is deeply concerned whenever horses in her care become ill. After all, one virus can threaten her entire stable. Early in 2018 a mysterious infection spread through Isabell’s barn only days after a glorious show performance. The feverish illness manifested itself dramatically—in fact, she lost two horses. The fight against the virus brought Isabell and her entire team to rock bottom—they had no strength left. More than a hundred horses had to be checked several times a day for weeks on end—not only her own, but also precious boarding horses for which she had taken responsibility. It seemed the vet was a permanent guest at the barn—when he was not on site, he was constantly on the phone. At one point, several thermometers actually stopped working due to overwork and had to be replaced.
It was so cold outside the barn that canisters full of disinfectant were frozen. Double-door systems with disinfection mats were put in place to try to eliminate transfer of the virus. Luckily, Isabell’s current competition horses had stalls in a separate barn aisle and were given medication to strengthen their immune systems, so they were not affected by the wave of infection. But the entire Team Werth had to fight a downright battle for weeks.
Isabell, the tough one, the woman who accepts any athletic challenge almost with pleasure, was more anxious than she’d ever felt before—she was faced with an uncertain situation and a certain powerlessness. Only days before the outbreak she had told the press that, during her career, she had never been so happy and relaxed than in her current streak of athletic achievements. But only a day later the old wisdom was confirmed: Problems always arise when you least expect them. This can apply to many things but is even more true when you are dealing with vulnerable living beings. It is in those moments that your entire life’s experience still will not help you.
The Werth family has always interacted with horses. Heinrich fox hunted. Isabell’s mother, Brigitte, the daughter of vegetable and fruit farmers close to the city of Bonn, brought a mare called Palette with her when she married Heinrich. Brigitte rode Palette leisurely on hacks and had some fun with her at the local riding club.
Isabell, somewhat disrespectfully, calls this “housewife riding.”
Isabell started riding so early that she can hardly remember her first pony, Illa. She first sat on Illa at five years old. Her first ride was on “a little black horse”—this is all she remembers. Then it was the mare Sabrina. Isabell was not yet eight years old when she had to pass her first crucial horse test: Sabrina got scared right in front of the house for some reason and spooked. Isabell fell off and landed on the stairs, right on her face. She still has a small scar from the little stone that bored into her forehead. Her nose was torn, her lips burst open on the inside—she was taken to the hospital for stitches. In addition to the face wounds, she had a concussion. She had to spend a week in the hospital, eating and drinking with a feeding cup only. She told her dad furiously that she was done with riding, and that he could give Sabrina away. But one day later, remembers Heinrich, she changed her story completely.
“Listen, Dad,” she announced from her hospital bed, “I will teach her to listen to me.”
Ultimately, however, the gray mare was not allowed to stay. Sabrina was just too spooky for little girls.
Isabell and her sister Claudia grew into the German riding club lifestyle almost automatically, just what you would expect of social butterflies from the Rhineland. A large part of their youth was spent at Graf von Schmettow Eversael, the riding club not far from their farm.
We smoked our first cigarette behind the indoor arena. And we drank our first apple schnapps behind the embankment.
Three times a week, Claudia and I showed up for riding lessons with our ponies: twice for dressage lessons, once for jumping. On the weekend, we went on hacks with ten or fifteen kids, all with backpacks. We played games: skill games, gymkhana games, jousting, circus tricks. The horses had to wear hats, hearts, glitter, and glimmer—they were just as fancifully dressed up as we were. We chased across fields and swam with our horses in the river. I was always desperate during pony races because my pony, Funny, was smaller than Claudia’s (named Fee), and despite the utmost efforts on my part, I could not beat my sister. Funny was a 12-hand Welsh pony. Fee was half an inch taller and more wiry. In best-case scenarios, Funny made it to Fee’s tail during our races. But she was still awesome. Well-behaved, lazy, small, a little chubby. She did not like jumping at all, and I regularly came off, despite my persuasive powers (always once, sometimes even twice or three times in a lesson). It became my personal challenge to finish a jumping competition, just once, without falling off.
Despite the challenges of her pony, Isabell remained tough, and her mother managed to keep calm at the sight of her daughter being catapulted through the air. She only wondered where her daughter got the energy to climb back on the horse, again and again, after she had fallen off! Brigitte did not only drive her daughters to the riding club but also to their first horse shows, supporting their passion as best as she could. With their ponies, the sisters rode against other children on full-size horses.
Isabell’s father’s parents, with whom the family shared the house and who were still rooted in the traditional view of agricultural, were perhaps less supportive. Keeping horses for pleasure? Just for the children? Pointlessly driving the kids and ponies around when the time could be better used for work at home? Brigitte disregarded their objections, and the girls were allowed to ride. But, their resolute