New year, new horse for equestrienne Caroline Chew

Three years after an unexpected elimination at the Tokyo Olympics with her gelding Tribiani, Caroline Chew will have another chance after she secured a Paris 2024 dressage individual quota for Singapore, pending official ratification by the International Federation for Equestrian Sports.

On Dec 29, the 31-year-old London-based lawyer finished 10th with stallion Zatchmo in the Mechelen, Belgium leg of the Grand Prix Freestyle to Music competition with a personal best score of 75.975, which translates to 239 Olympic ranking points.

The Olympic qualification ranking takes into account the best four scores in 2023. The two highest-ranked athletes from five groups - north-western Europe; south-western Europe; central and eastern Europe and central Asia; Africa and Middle East; and south and east Asia and Oceania - earn one individual quota each for their national Olympic committee.

Altogether, Chew rode in six qualifiers in Europe. Other than her Mechelen results, her top scores included strong performances in London (75.665 for 236 Olympic ranking points), Madrid (74.310 for 223 points) and Wroclaw, Poland (73.530 for 215 points).

Her total of 913 points puts her second in the south and east Asia and Oceania group behind New Zealand's Melissa Galloway, who tallied 1,023 points with her gelding Windermere J'obei W.

Dressage consists of a number of tests in which the rider and horse are awarded marks for performing routines containing specified movements. Chew's achievement with 14-year-old Zatchmo is all the more impressive considering they have just started competing together in 2023, as Tribiani is getting on in years.

She actually started the year with both horses - from the same Blue Hors stable in Denmark - before focusing solely on Zatchmo from September.

Remarkably, in the Olympic qualification rankings, Chew is also in third place with Tribiani on 883 points with scores from the first four months of the year.

She told The Straits Times: "I've had Tribiani going on nine years, so the plan was always to start the year strong with him. We took the big step of going to America to do the winter circuit - this was a huge undertaking for my team, supported by my work colleagues, and supercharged the start of our campaign.

"When we came back to Europe, I switched my focus to Zatchmo and started trying to develop that partnership, and that paid off towards the end of the year.

"Tribiani will soon be 20, so even though we have a really great partnership and we're very comfortable with each other, there's always the worry about injury and other considerations. That's why we made the decision to get Zatchmo in 2022 and make sure we had two irons in the fire.

"They are both fundamentally very kind horses. Even though Zatchmo is a stallion, he is not aggressive and is easy to handle. He loves all kinds of food and is always hungry - usually for carrots.

"He's a really talented horse and his performances with his previous rider factored into our decision to buy him.

"We are still learning new things about each other every day; it's about finding a way to communicate together effectively, adapting what I've learnt from Tribiani and applying it to an exciting new partnership."