Charlotte Dujardin

The Olympic champion is back to her winning ways after having baby Isabella, but tells Polly Bryan how motherhood has altered her perspective on the sport

- Polly Bryan

WHEN Charlotte Dujardin rode Imhotep into the arena at the World Dressage Championships in August 2022, she was keeping a very special secret.

“I was riding down the centre line not thinking about any of the things I normally would. Instead I was thinking, ‘I’ve got a baby in my tummy,’” she remembers. “It was all very new then and it felt incredible.”

Now, 10 months later, baby Isabella is here and sleeping peacefully in Charlotte’s arms in the middle of the idyllic Gloucestershire stable yard, Imhotep’s chestnut and white face bobbing over the stable door just opposite.

Born in early March, Isabella has been “the icing on the cake” for the double Olympic champion, who also won double bronze at the Tokyo Games in 2021, and Charlotte’s beaming smile and shining eyes reveal just how much this little girl means to both her and her fiancé, Dean Golding.

It’s fair to say that her arrival was impeccably timed by anyone’s standards, with Charlotte helping Britain secure team silver at the worlds while newly pregnant, and now starting to campaign Imhotep, also known as Pete, for the European Championships this summer. She admits she was surprised by how well her meticulous plan had worked out.

“Dean and I had talked about it, and I knew I wanted to be pregnant by June 2022 – and I was,” she says, as we sit down to chat in the tack room of Carl Hester’s yard, where Charlotte has now been based for 16 years.