Meet the Ecuadorian rider who juggles a high-flying job with his eventing career

Nicolas Wettstein holds three passports, speaks five languages and juggles a senior management job in pharmaceuticals alongside eventing at the very top level. A high-flyer indeed.

Nicolas, who is based in Geneva, has ridden internationally for three different nations, having been born in Switzerland to a French mother, and then being married to an Ecuadorian for 10 years, but despite his current partner being Swiss, he remains committed to riding for Ecuador – and plans to move there some day.

“I will finish my days in Ecuador for sure,” says Nicolas, who will become a father for the first time in November. “I am going there every year now, three or four times. I will try to get my partner, Diana, to love Ecuador as much as I do and I hope that once the horsey career and the normal career are over, we will go to live there.”

For now, Nicolas continues to combine his eventing with his career as manager of a pharmaceutical company, riding at 5am every morning before starting work. He has two horses, the 11-year-old chestnut gelding Altier D’Aurois, whom he rode at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and the 15-year-old grey gelding Meyer’s Happy, whom he rode to a dressage score of 39.4 on day one of the World Eventing Championships in Pratoni, where he is competing for Ecuador as an individual.

“I had a positive feeling about the test,” reports Nicolas, though he added that he was a little disappointed with the mark he received.

He and Happy have been partners since the horse was seven years old, although a bout of colic just two months after Happy joined Nicolas meant the gelding spent much of their first year together off games.

“He is a very, very strong horse with a huge stride. He is difficult to manage at the mental level, but physically he has everything to be up with the best ones. So it’s all about managing the mental part: never going too much against him. There has been a lot of time and patience and a lot of work.”

His two horses are very different, he says, and while it was Altier D’Aurois, who stepped up to take on the Olympic challenge in 2021, he favoured Happy for this championship due to the “very physical cross-country” in Pratoni. His big aim now is Paris 2024, for which he will campaign both horses.

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