Frederic Wandres and Bluetooth OLD staying warm and dry this season

Should Germany’s Frederic Wandres and Bluetooth OLD win tonight’s dressage CDI5* Grand Prix Special held at Wellington International they will not be celebrating in the way they did their Grand Prix Freestyle win two years ago, which landed them in cold water.

The Winter Equestrian Festival hosted their dressage neighbors in the International Ring for the first time in 2022. It was a big occasion and Frederic and Bluetooth celebrated the next day. “A day after the prize-giving for the five-star. I say ‘oh come on, we do something nice’,” Frederic recalled. “We hack out and we end up in the canal.”

This evening the pair will compete not in the Freestyle but in the Grand Prix Special as part of their campaign for the Paris Olympics as it is this class that will determine the medals later this year at Versailles. This week they debuted at the Global Dressage Festival in Wellington after a five-month hiatus from competition.

“He had a hard summer last year showing very consistently, so he earned himself a break from the show scene,” said Frederic, 36, after he and Bluetooth won Wednesday night’s CDI5* FEI Grand Prix with a score of 76.196%. They missed out on closing in on their personal best of 77.888% awarded at last September’s European Championships after a mistake in the one-time changes, for which Frederic took full responsibility. “I had a super expensive mistake, the one-tempi mistake, but the rest of the test felt pretty flawless and super nice,” he said.

Two years ago the celebratory trail ride turned into an anecdote that would cause many a dressage rider to grow pale. Bluetooth is unaccustomed to spooking but hacking out that day on a long rein, the horse saw something and froze. “He stopped and I felt his heartbeat through his saddle,” said Frederic. “He turned around and we fell in the canal.”

Submerged in canal water up to Wandres’ waist, Bluetooth got them out with an instinct that Wandres thinks he may have learned from one of his former riders, German eventer Ingrid Klimke. “Maybe he learned that from Ingrid, I don’t know, from the eventing,” Frederic said. “In one jump he got out, did a big [spin] and then we went home. If we had not made it out, I think he would have been afraid to be in there.”

Back at the barn Wandres and Bluetooth painted a very different picture from the perfection of the dressage arena. “I was wet up to here,” Wandres said, pointing to his chest, “covered in muck and stinking and everyone was like ‘Where have you been?’”

So far this season, the pair have stayed warm and dry. “He’s really enjoyed the sun here,” said Frederic after the win earlier this week. aboard Hof Kasselman’s 14-year old Oldenburg gelding. “And we took time to invest into the small details, and I think that worked tonight. The mistake is something I can fix, and I’m looking personally more for other things; like presenting to the judges in a super harmonious way, in a good frame, with a happy horse and always light in the contact.”