When my fiancé left me, I kept on thinking: Why was I not good enough?
A broken engagement. Her champion horse out of action. Her mother critically ill. Charlotte Dujardin faced so many hurdles in the build-up to Tokyo. Now she tells how she battled back to be on top of the world
CHARLOTTE DuJARDIN tries to keep a tight rein on her emotions. She can’t afford not to, competing in a sport in which, as she says, her horse picks up ‘every mood’, ‘every emotion’.
Yet, when she won a bronze for her individual dressage performance in Tokyo on her bouncy little chestnut Gio to secure her place in history as one of the most decorated British female Olympian of all time, she wept.
‘It was so surreal,’ she says. ‘When I got the score I was like, “oh my God, he’s medalled. He’s done it.” I couldn’t quite believe it. It was just amazing — so amazing. I’m not an emotional person. I don’t really cry, but I literally cried like — I can’t even tell you.’
She flashes the million-watt smile that endeared her to all of us at the 2012 London Olympics where she emerged as a poster girl for equestrian sports after winning two gold medals.
So much so that the Queen, herself an avid horsewoman, invited her to Buckingham Palace where she told those gathered for afternoon tea, ‘now, you’ve never seen anyone ride quite as well as this young lady.’ Charlotte, who, believe me, can chat away like there’s no tomorrow, was ‘totally speechless’.
Her 2012 triumph was followed with a silver medal in the team dressage in Rio’s 2016 Olympics, a gold in the Grand Prix Freestyle and a marriage proposal from her boyfriend of ten years, Dean Golding, who stuck a homemade sign to his shirt asking, ‘Can we get married now?’
They were actually already engaged, she says, this was his way of saying ‘hurry up’. Only, the wedding never happened. Dean left her a year ago, totally breaking her heart.
‘I actually did my Grand Prix (the individual dressage) in Toyko a year to the day after we split up. A year ago, I was so distraught. It was one of the worst days I’d ever had emotionally, physically. I didn’t know what to do with my life.
‘Yet that morning in Tokyo I just thought “look at me now, I’m right up here at an Olympics. I’ve just won a team bronze. How much happier can you be?”
‘To go from being down there,’ she touches the ground. ‘To up here.’ Now she raises her arm high above her head. ‘That’s why life is so amazing.’
Charlotte returned from Tokyo last week and is still all over the place. ‘Buzzing,’ she says. Her horse Gio (she calls him Pumpkin) is a young gelding of just ten years, which in dressage terms is an absolute beginner.
He came in as a last-minute replacement for the more experienced Mount St John, who, after an injury, was deemed not fit to go to Tokyo. Charlotte had just three weeks to prepare her little chestnut. Their success is nothing short of a miracle — or as Olympic commentators said, ‘a fairy tale’.
‘When a reporter said, “Do you know you’re the most decorated?” I’m like, “oh my God”.’ Again, that huge smile splits her face in two.
She was soon to be matched by cyclist Laura Kenny — both now have six medals apiece.
What the world didn’t know, however, was that back home, Charlotte’s mother Jane was very ill in hospital. So ill, in fact, the family had kept it from her.
She’d developed sepsis following a hernia operation, and everyone thought she was recovering, before she took a dramatic turn for the worse and was readmitted for emergency surgery — while Charlotte was still competing.
‘I spoke to my sister (Emma Jane) after I had won the bronze medal and that’s when she told me. There were tears and laughter as her sister told her that their mother had point blank refused to have the operation until after the dressage team final on Tuesday.
As soon as Charlotte returned from Tokyo she went straight to Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital where her mother was being treated — and is still recovering now.
‘Just to see her, to see how proud she was of me was so emotional. She just kept saying how incredibly proud she was. Then my dad had bought all the newspapers. He’s like, “Charlotte, I can’t believe it, you’re on every front page!” I sat there with a box of tissues.’
Charlotte’s parents had supported her fiercely throughout her career. The Dujardins — Charlotte has a brother and sister — are a deeply loving family but there was precious little money. Her mother Jane and father Ian, who raised their children in Enfield, worked their socks off to support their daughter’s passion for horses.
Her father had a packaging company that made a living for the family but they never had the sort of wealth needed for a sport in which buying and maintaining a top-level dressage horse can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Charlotte’s mother encouraged her daughter’s passion for horses from when she was barely out of nappies, walking her on a rein round a paddock near their home.
Her parents bought her and her sister Emma Jane Shetland ponies which was how she spent her early
I was no one when we met, then won gold
childhood, racing with her sister across ‘any field we could find, falling off a lot and getting back on.’ Show ponies followed and, although Emma Jane was three years older, it was Charlotte — who is dyslexic and far preferred horses to school — who turned out to be
the more talented.
She was 19 when her mother received an inheritance after her own mother died from cancer. She used the money to buy her daughter her first dressage horse.
‘That money would have made a big difference for Mum and Dad but my mum gave it up to buy my first dressage horse. My nan would have loved me to have him and without that money we’d never have been able to afford him.’
Charlotte’s love and worry for her mum is writ large across her face. We’re sitting in the legendary dressage trainer and fellow Olympian Carl Heston’s yard in Newent, Gloucestershire where Charlotte keeps her horses.
He competed with her in the team dressage in Tokyo to win a bronze and is part ‘like a friend’ and part ‘like a dad’ to her. She says he has been there for her through thick and thin.
‘You can’t bring your personal life to work but Carl’s always understood what I’ve gone through. Life’s funny isn’t it?’ she says.
‘I saw Dean yesterday. He wished me luck before I went and texted me to say he was proud of me. It’s nice, isn’t it, that we can still be friends? ‘Some people do say to me, “how” or “why” about our break-up, my whole family to be honest. Dean was the one. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with him. Heartbreak is probably one of the hardest things to deal with, isn’t it?’
Dean, 42, is a tall, dark, strapping man from Durban, South Africa whose father owned a pub in a nearby Cotswolds village, and who was introduced to Charlotte by Carl in 2007. Like Charlotte, he was ‘very sporty’ and a gifted swimmer, who supported her wholeheartedly in her career. But, she was, as she says ‘a no-one’ until 2012 when she became a double-gold Olympian.
‘We were living together in a little cottage just down the road from here and got engaged a year after we met, and then I became successful at London 2012. Oh my God, it was crazy.
‘Dean found the media side of things really difficult — that and not being able to see me so much because I was travelling abroad a lot competing,’ she says. ‘He said, “the media know more about you than I do”.’
He told her he was leaving her the night she was due to switch on the Christmas lights in Newent. Charlotte ‘put a front on’, trying to be cheerful, but as soon as they returned home Dean packed his bags and left.
She admits she ‘probably wasn’t easy to be around’ — she was going through a lot of stress at the time as Carl was proposing to sell her beloved horse, Valegro — known as Blueberry — who’d she’d ridden to Olympic triumph.
‘He told me he needed to be alone to clear his head. That was the hardest thing. Dean was my first love. It felt like I’d had everything and then it was all taken away. I’d lost my relationship. I was going to lose my horse — my whole life had been turned upside down.
‘If I could have given my medals back and have things return to the way they were, I would have done. I remember having to go to shows and everyone would be like, “are you OK?” Whenever I was with Blueberry everything disappeared. I was in my bubble.
‘But when I wasn’t with him I wasn’t in a good place.’
Charlotte lost two stone in weight and became so low she even thought about harming herself.
‘I had no idea what to do next,’ she says. ‘I just remember no matter where I went, what I did or who I spoke to, no one could get rid of the pain other than Dean.’
They discussed their problems. Dean agreed to ‘step up’ and six months later he moved back into the little cottage. Thankfully, Carl decided to keep Valegro so Charlotte and her dancing horse continued to compete, breaking world record upon world record, but the pressure of her success soon began affecting her relationship.
‘As the double Olympic champion there was definitely a lot of pressure going to Rio,’ she says. ‘Dean probably got the brunt of most of that. We’d got engaged again before Rio and I’d said yes.
‘When I saw the sign I thought it was Dean through and through. He puts a bit of humour into everything. It was his way of saying, “hurry up. I’m going to make this known to everybody so we finally set a date.”
‘Obviously being away a lot was hard but I would just say, before going I would always feel really homesick. I’d never want to leave Dean. I always wanted him to be there — to be a part of it. I think he meant more to me than he really knew. Maybe I didn’t show that in the right way because I always have this front on.’
On July 28, 2020, Charlotte should have been competing in Tokyo, but the Games had been postponed for a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of triumphantly celebrating a third gold medal victory as everyone expected her to, Charlotte was in despair. Dean was leaving her once again.
‘He made that decision — that call — and I had to go through with it so he went and I went away to Cornwall. Some friends down there invited me for the weekend. We took the horses swimming, galloped on Bude beach, anything to take my mind away from Dean.
‘I kept thinking why? Why was I not good enough? Why didn’t it work? To be honest, Dean is 42 so there’s six years between us. I think we just outgrew each other. I just went to places beyond where
My whole life was turned upside down
It was a real test of my strength as a person
he even thought I could go and he struggled with that.
‘He had his life he wanted to lead and I guess he thought I couldn’t support him enough in what he did.’ She is determined to be fair to the man who was such a huge part of her life. But it’s still hard not to feel for her.
‘When he left I was absolutely terrified. I just remember being like, ‘oh God, I’m in the house on my own. It’s a lonely place to be and I’m not going to say it was easy. It was a real test of my strength and of where I was as a person.
‘I realised I needed to find who I was. I don’t think I had found that out because I’d always had him and always, kind of, kept going back. Actually, I was like, “no, you need to find yourself.” ’
When Charlotte returned from Cornwall she got up the next morning and began work at Carl’s yard at 7.30am. There was a little horse she’d bought shortly after her Rio 2016 triumph when he was five years old. Earlier that year he had made his Grand Prix debut at just nine-years-old. Charlotte knew in her bones he was special.
From the moment she got on him that morning there was no Dean, no pain, no heartache. ‘Just me and him,’ she says. That little horse was, of course, her beloved Pumpkin with whom, a year later, she would, against all odds, make British Olympic history.
‘I’d love to settle down at some point,’ she says. ‘Not with Dean. I’ve been there and I’ve tortured myself enough. I deserve to go on now and find someone I can spend the rest of my life with.
‘I can see myself having kids and one day I can say to them, “Mummy was the most decorated.” She flashes that smile again before correcting herself. “No, I can say, Mummy is.”
‘Laura will probably beat my six medals. But I can win more in Paris 2024 and keep going for years in dressage. So, hopefully, I’ll get my most decorated title back.
‘What matters right now though is that I’m lucky that we are all still here, particularly my mum.’