When Justin Verboomen made European Championship history last summer – double gold, Belgium’s first-ever dressage medals – the messages flooded in. But there was one he sent himself, to the person who had inspired him since he was a child watching dressage. He messaged Carl Hester.
“For me – rider, teacher – he’s really the example I have had since I was a kid,” Justin says. After the European Dressage Championships, he reached out to ask whether Carl might occasionally be able to help him. “He answered me,” Justin adds, “but we haven’t planned anything specific yet.”
So while we might not see Justin and Zonik Plus coming down the lane at Oaklebrook Mill just yet, it tells you everything about the man that his first instinct after making history was to reach out and ask how he could be better.
Raised in a household shaped by horses – his father was a riding instructor, his early education rooted in classical dressage and Lusitano breeding – Justin spent years building quietly, developing a philosophy he still lives by today.
“My goal – and I don’t say I succeed all the time – is always to find the way in which the horse will be able to do the exercises in a beautiful but comfortable way,” he says.
Read the full interview in this week’s Horse & Hound, get your copy here
Last summer’s breakthrough arrived, in his own words, “naturally.”
“There was really no plan,” he says. “It was one competition after another because we were invited.”
Staying grounded through it all was, he admits, the hardest part – and working with a mental coach helped.
“I try to stay focused just on my horse and what I have to do in the arena,” he says. “When I enter the arena, I just want to do something good. I was not expecting to be first. So after, it’s like a kind of surprise when you hear the scores, and you are first.”
He’s carrying the same approach into this summer’s World Championships. “If I start thinking about the placings, it really puts a different pressure on things. It has a negative impact on the training.”
Away from competition, life is built around the horses, his husband Jonathan, four dogs, and plans for his own stables – a childhood dream inching closer to reality.
On a normal day, he rides 10 horses, starting when the first groom arrives at half past seven. “I prefer to be alone with the horses,” he says, “and not surrounded by too many humans.”
The Europeans, for all their glory, were in that sense the hardest part. After the test came the media, then the doping test – and by the time he got back to the stable, two hours had passed.
“Nobody is there anymore, and you’ve missed all the nice parts,” he says. “When you do something like that – a good test – the only thing you want is to spend time with your horse and go back to the stable.”
Read the full Justin Verboomen interview, including life on the yard, his riding philosophy, and the European Championships moment that changed everything, in this week’s Horse & Hound, in shops from 23 April.
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