Sport
Charlotte Fry and Glamourdale repeated their Herning double, Germany won a 13th team title, and six nations booked LA28 team places.
Charlotte Fry and Glamourdale arrived at the 2026 FEI Dressage World Championships in Aachen as the defending champions from Herning 2022. They left with both individual titles again. Germany won the team gold, and the Grand Prix doubled as the first Olympic qualifier for Los Angeles 2028.
Germany’s 13th team title
The team competition finished on 12 August. Germany scored 235.063%, 3.618 points ahead of Great Britain, with defending champions Denmark taking bronze. It was Germany’s 13th team world title and their first in Aachen since 2006.
The team was Katharina Hemmer (Denoix PCH), Raphael Netz (Great Escape Camelot), Frederic Wandres (Bluetooth OLD) and Isabell Werth (Wendy de Fontaine). Hemmer scored a personal best of 79.224%, and Werth then edged past her with 79.876% to clinch gold. Great Britain kept the team silver they won in 2022. Their team included two horses bred by their own riders: Becky Moody’s Jagerbomb and Fiona Bigwood’s Donna Bella.
Six teams qualified for LA28: Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden.
The Grand Prix Special: a narrow margin
On 14 August, Fry and Glamourdale won the Grand Prix Special with 82.295%. Denmark’s Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour and Mount St John Freestyle were second on 80.927%. Hemmer and Denoix PCH were third on 80.866%, just 0.061 percentage points behind, in what she called the ride of her life. Werth finished fourth and the reigning European champions, Justin Verboomen and Zonik Plus of Belgium, fifth.
Laudrup-Dufour had come in as one of the favourites, having had the highest scores of the season, but small mistakes in the one-tempi changes and a pirouette cost her. Following veterinary advice, Hemmer did not start in the Freestyle, which opened a place for Frederic Wandres and Belgium’s Larissa Pauluis.
The Freestyle: four in a row
In the Freestyle on 16 August, Fry and Glamourdale scored 91.907% with a flight-themed programme that opened with “Welcome to Glamourdale Airlines”. It was their fourth individual world gold in a row, after the same double in Herning. Laudrup-Dufour took silver with a personal best of 91.236% and said she felt she had won that medal rather than lost the gold. Werth, the last to go, took bronze on 88.650%. Verboomen finished 0.211 points behind her in fourth, and Becky Moody and Jagerbomb were fifth with a Beatles freestyle.
Fry said Glamourdale, now 15, “just keeps improving”. It is a useful reminder that a well-managed Grand Prix horse can stay at the top well into his teens.
What owners can take from it
You don’t need a world-class horse to learn something here. The top combinations all showed the same things: relaxed horses, steady contact and partnerships built over years. If you are buying a dressage horse, look for that same kind of trainability and temperament, and remember that long-term soundness is worth more than flashy movement in a young horse.