interview
The darling of Danish dressage tells Polly Bryan about her drive to inspire others and why her European bronze medallist nearly didn’t make it to grand prix
Danish dressage rider Cathrine Dufour
CATHRINE DUFOUR is curled up in a corner of the Heathrow airport coffee shop where we have arranged to meet during a rare spare hour in her whirlwind schedule. She’s hunched over her phone, wearing jeans and a black hoodie, her signature long hair scraped back behind large headphones. No one passing would guess that this is the Danish golden girl who stood beside Germany’s Isabell Werth and Sönke Rothenberger on the European Championship podium in Gothenburg last year, claiming double individual bronze alongside team silver for Denmark.
The Rio Olympics may have come a tad too soon for Cathrine and Atterupgaards Cassidy, who made their senior grand prix debut just 10 months before the finishing 13th at the Games, but 2017 was the year Cathrine came of age.
“Rio came up so fast — we had only just cracked the grand prix — but winning medals at the Euros was just crazy. It was the perfect show; I still get goose bumps
just talking about it,” she enthuses.
The 26-year-old is no stranger to success — her incredible journey with the 15-year-old Cassidy spans eight years, and together they won European medals in juniors and young riders before sweeping the board in under-25 grands prix and finally bursting onto the senior stage in late 2015. It’s a special partnership, but the fiery chestnut gelding has brought as many challenges as he has medals over the years.
“He has a thousand quirks, and is just so crazy hot,” explains Cathrine, who originally disregarded the Caprimond son when she first saw him at the Danish young horse championships. “As soon as you enter the arena he sort of seizes up and stops breathing — like a hot balloon ready to pop. It’s been a process just teaching him to breathe, but it also took a long time to get to grand prix because he just couldn’t understand piaffe. It took a year to convince him it was ok to trot on the spot — I was about to give up, but training with Kyra Kyrklund was the turning point, and we finally cracked the code.
“He also hated seeing himself or another horse on big screens. He freaked out at the livestreaming at our first international senior grand prix and we finished second-last. After that I took my own TV from my apartment and put it in his stable, and then in the arena, to help him get used to it, but he was still frightened for a long time.”
Cassidy’s fear of screens has been a major reason why Cathrine has not previously pursued World Cup qualification — “I always have to text organisers first to ask if they have a livestream in the arena” — although that is changing. She scored 88% to win February’s Gothenburg leg — at which she finally demoted her idol Isabell Werth into second — elevating herself into the number three position on the world rankings.
CATHRINE’S is certainly a dream story: starting out in a riding school, before finding the horse to take her from juniors to sharing podiums with her heroes, the likes of Patrik Kittel and Isabell Werth — “one day I’ll be as good as her”. But I quickly get the impression that the word “can’t” is just not in Cathrine’s vocabulary.
“I remember telling my dad that I wanted to go to the Olympics — he was like, ‘You what?’” she laughs. “It can be embarrassing to say your dreams out loud sometimes, but you’ve got to tell your parents and your trainers what you are dreaming of and give it a go.”
For Cathrine, that trainer was Rune Willum, who coached her since her riding school days, and whom she admits became like a second father. The pair parted ways amicably earlier this year, with Cathrine setting off on her own to train with Kyra Kyrklund.
But finding the perfect trainer was just one part of it — when I ask how she has made it coming from a non-horsey family and relatively humble beginnings, the answer is simple: hard work and passion.
“I worked my arse off for years and it’s now paying off,” she says. “That’s what it takes — if you want to be the best or the richest or whatever, you have to just get going, make it happen and do it yourself.”
It’s a message she is committed to passing on to upcoming riders.
“I really have this passion for young people; I can see myself in them,” she says. “I want to be that trainer who can guide them, to be able to share my journey, show people what it takes, welcome them into this crazy world and help them believe that it can happen for them, too.”
Her desire to share and interact, and the vivacity with which she does so, has grown a legion of social media fans, with nearly 120,000 Instagram followers tuning in to her frequent, honest posts, detailing her life and training. And she hasn’t stopped there, launching the Dufour Club earlier this year, through which she invites riders to her yard to watch her training her horses and get an insight into her life — from her vigorous fitness regime to her modern, careful approach to nutrition.
“When I was younger, what I really needed was someone like Isabell [Werth] interacting, posting videos, sharing their ups and downs; but nobody was doing that,” she explains.
“I want to share the good and the bad, because what I’ve realised is that if you have a problem, you should say it out loud. There’s always going to be one person in the horse world to have had that problem; you’re never the first.”
It’s not hard to see why Cathrine appeals so much to younger riders — she’s infectiously bubbly and refreshingly down-to-earth, speaking fast and passionately in nearperfect English with a healthy dose of jokes and swear words dropped in. She’s the girl next door of dressage, but is also well aware of her privileged position of influence, and savvy enough to recognise the importance of building and growing her personal brand to ensure longevity in the dressage world.
The hard work can come at a price, however, and Cathrine tells me how difficult she has found it at times to balance the horses with other aspects of her life — a 2017 trip to Greece with her girlfriend Katrine Hedeman was her first holiday in five years. Now, she takes a day off most weeks, and gives her horses plenty of downtime, too, with lots of hacking and jumping.
Her immediate aim is the World Equestrian Games, but she’s got a keen eye on the longer term, with two particularly exciting younger horses coming up the ranks: the eight-yearold Bohemian, who she deems more naturally talented than Cassidy, and her own sevenyear-old Rosendal’s Zundance, whom she also describes as “crazy hot”. Cassidy may have launched Cathrine into the global spotlight, but really, she’s only just getting started.