Charlotte Dujardin third in Aachen special as Lottie Fry also qualifies for freestyle

Charlotte Dujardin gained another podium place at Aachen today when she finished third in the grand prix special, the Meggle prize.

Piloting Sonnar Murray Brown’s Erlentanz, Charlotte was the last competitor to enter the arena and put in an excellent test to score 80.277%, with her only error being a momentary break in rhythm in the passage at A. She was clearly delighted with the 12-year-old by Latimer.

Britain finished fifth in the team standings for the Lambertz Nations Cup, less than three marks behind the US in bronze. Denmark took second, with Germany more than 30 marks clear to take the top spot.

Lottie Fry finished 10th for Britain today and therefore qualifies alongside Charlotte to ride in the freestyle tomorrow morning. Her test today with her own and the Van Olsts’ Dark Legend scored 75.128%.

“The spectators started clapping as we were coming in and he got tense and didn’t want to stop in the first halt, but apart from that he was amazing,” she said.

Louise Bell was also pleased with Into The Blue, who scored 68.851% for 25th despite problems in two of the sets of tempi changes.

“I don’t know why he got distracted, but apart from that it’s the best test he’s done,” she said. “I didn’t want to let the team down and the pressure was on, so I’m sad about that as I don’t like to make mistakes, but it’s still amazing to get that score with two massive mistakes.”

The top three individually were unchanged from Thursday’s grand prix, with Isabell Werth leading the way on Madeleine Winter-Schulze’s Bella Rose 2 with 84.447%. She had one tiny glitch in a piaffe mid-test, but set that right later by scoring 10s across the board for her final piaffe.

Isabell’s team-mate Dorothee Schneider was just 0.83% behind on Gabriele Kippert’s Showtime FRH, who had a couple of errors in transitions but excelled in his passage and canter pirouttes.

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The CDIO5* concludes tomorrow with the freestyle, which takes place at 10am local time (9am British time).

Check back for more news from Aachen over the weekend, plus full reports in next week’s Horse & Hound (dated 25 July).

Pippa Roome

H&H magazine editor and eventing editor

Pippa is a true eventing geek and has been H&H’s eventing editor since 2005. She has first-hand experience of competing up to British Eventing intermediate and international CCI2*-L level, and has worked in the industry on a top event yard. Pippa enjoys nothing more than immersing herself in the sport at the highest level, reporting from the five-stars and international championships, including the Olympics.