British showjumper Harry Charles enjoyed the best possible start to 2026 with victory in the CSI4* 1.55m grand prix at HH The Father Amir’s Prix at Al Shaqab, Doha, Qatar, riding 16-year-old Casquo Blue.
Harry pipped team-mate Scott Brash and the mighty Hello Folie by just 0.28sec to deliver a British one-two.
“It’s going to be incredibly hard to beat Folie over the next few years, so I’ll take one while I can – it won’t happen very often!” said Harry. “Casquo’s not normally the quickest so maybe my round was a bit deceiving. Scott did say to me, ‘I didn’t think I had to go that fast!’ He did one stride more than me down one line and I think that’s probably where I won it.”
Harry Charles on his jump-off round: “I took a big risk to the double”
Casquo Blue (Chacco-Blue x Carthago Z) has been an integral part of Harry Charles’s string for several years and a key part of Nations Cup teams including winning at Hickstead, and the pair represented Great Britain at the 2023 European showjumping championships, but this was their first grand prix success together. It came after a five-way jump-off to decide the €60,000 top prize.
“Going into the jump-off, I thought I’d be happy to be third at worst,” said Harry. “I thought, Scott and Folie are going to get me regardless, so I might as well try to make him work for it a bit! So I went as fast as I could.
“Casquo’s not that quick and that’s why maybe he hasn’t got a big win like this before – he’s had a lot of second and third places, but I just always found myself a second behind the leaders, even when I felt like I’d left everything out there. I was just never quite able to get ahead.
“This time I took a big risk into the double, it paid off luckily, and he was really good coming home.”
Reducing the workload to keep 16-year-old Casquo in shape
Harry attributes Casquo’s longevity and consistency to competing him “quite sparingly over the past year, especially the past few months, to keep him happy and feeling great in his body”.
“He’s 16 now and he’s been very much push-button for the past two years, he’s well past the point of needing education or learning rounds – he knows his job exactly now,” explained Harry. “As long as you start off well with him at a show and do one warm-up class, you can walk into pretty much any class. Even if I got called up a fortnight before a Nations Cup, he could just have a couple of jumps at home and go.
“He has his way and he’s not going to change. So if you stick to what he knows, he’s super simple in the arena.”
That careful management of the teenage gelding, jointly owned by Harry’s father Peter Charles and Stall Zet, extends to his work at home, too.
“He’ll maybe jump once every two weeks at home, maximum,” said Harry. “I have two good riders, Izzy and Rachel – one in the Netherlands, one in England – they’re a lot lighter than me so they ride him on the flat a lot.
“So it’s just about finding little ways to reduce the workload off him, make his training as easy as possible, and hopefully he’ll be in good shape for another couple of years. We know each other very well, so he makes my life quite easy.”
Read the full report from HH The Father Amir’s Prix at Al Shaqab, Doha, Qatar, including the CSI2* grand prix success for Olli Fletcher riding Cajus 42, in this week’s Horse & Hound magazine, in shops Thursday, 8 January.
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