“He’s My Soulmate”: Hallie Coon Takes Day One Luhmühlen Lead

From the moment Hallie Coon first sat on the then-ten-year-old Kapriccio, she says, “it was weird – it was just like meeting your soulmate, as cheesy as that sounds.”

The British-based US rider isn’t prone to excesses of emotion, but when she tries to explain what the gelding means to her, she has to fight back a groundswell of tears.

“I’ve had a lot of horses that I’ve loved in my life, and this one tops them all,” she says. “I’ve only had him for a year, but he’s just like – you hold his hand and he’ll give you every bit of his heart. He means the world to me.”

Their fledgling partnership began when neighbour Julia Norman received the shock news that a fall while training, which rendered her unconscious for 45 minutes, had left her on the precipice of a life-altering brain injury, and she could risk no further accidents. The Zimbabwean five-star rider wanted to ensure her horses went to riders who wouldn’t just carry on their career trajectories, but would love them as she had done – and so, with her two top horses in mind, she picked up the phone to Hallie.

Now, a year down the line, Kapriccio makes his five-star debut with Hallie in the irons. And at the end of day one at Luhmühlen? He’s leading the charge. The pair sit on a score of 27.8 overnight, the only sub-30 score of the day.

“To be honest, he did exactly what I thought he was going to do [in the ring], and it’s so special that I’m able to do it with him,” says Hallie.

Part of that consistency, Hallie explains, comes down to a new working relationship with dressage trainer Lisa White, with whom she’s been training for just three weeks – but who, she tells EN, has already been revolutionary to her system.

“Lisa has come into my life and changed a whole lot of my thinking in three weeks. I think I’ve learned more in that time about dressage than I have in the last five or six years – she’s just so strategic and so about the horse being happy and comfortable and feeling their best.”

It is, she says, “not just an amazing system – it also suits ‘Bruno’ down to the ground. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere without Lisa now; she’s my emotional support person!”

Although Lisa couldn’t make the trip out to Germany with Hallie, she’s been instrumental in the lead-up to today’s test, and coached the rider through a lesson yesterday via iPad, gamely assisted by groom Conor Coomey.

“She’s always at the end of the phone whenever I need her,” says Hallie. “She’s just immense.”

Her system has also helped Hallie to find her own mental equilibrium before a test. Whereas before, she admits that she could “go in the warm-up for 45 minutes before my test and not have any idea what I was trying to do,” Lisa has helped her to set and realise concrete objectives.

“I could make the horses look pretty in the warm-up but not really get to the bottom of them, and not necessarily be able to present it in the ring, but Lisa’s so objective: she’s like, ‘okay, this is what we’re doing, this is the plan, this is what we’ve prepared for, so if you go out there and do this and this, this is what will happen.’ It really helps my brain.”

Hallie and Bruno’s test was a clear outlier from the first movements: they scored a 9 from Christian Steiner at M for their decisive, confident entry, and followed it up with no less than 14 8s over the course of the ride.

Their result doesn’t just represent the best ride of the day; it’s also Bruno’s personal best at the upper levels. He hasn’t previously broken the 30 barrier at four-star and has done it just once at three-star and once at two-star, though he’s certainly been inching closer this season. He posted a 31 en route to winning the Oudskarpel CCI4*-S in April, and a 30.2 at Royal Jump last month, where he finished seventh in the same class.

“He’s just been perfect from the beginning, and we’ve worked really hard to get where we are, but I don’t think we could suit each other down to the ground anymore,” says Hallie. “I mean, he reads my mind, I read his – he’s just the best thing in the world, and every opportunity he’s just shown up and exceeded my expectations. He’s just so genuine, and obviously physically he’s so talented, but his brain is what makes him special – he’s so, so trainable.”

Hallie finishes Thursday at Luhmühlen sitting pretty on a nearly four-point margin ahead of the rest of the field.

“Those four marks are all Lisa’s,” she grins. “It’s been a good three weeks – imagine what another two months will do!”

Tim Price arguably started the day as the favourite to lead Thursday’s dressage, but the mercurial Happy Boy is nothing if not a bottomless well of surprises. Though the 2022 Boekelo champions produced some very smart work in the latter half of their test, the trot work – ordinarily a highlight for the fourteen-year-old – was marred by a break into canter in both the medium and extended trot.

It’s a departure from form for Happy Boy, whose greatest uncertainties are ordinarily on cross-country.

“He’s a bit of a Rubik’s Cube, this fellow,” says Tim. “I was walking the course with James Avery earlier, and I was saying that everyone always asks, ‘where is his issue?’ and I’m like, ‘well, it’s sometimes here and it’s sometimes there…!’ I’ve got to predict the unpredictable in terms of what would be the next little issue with him, so I’ve just got to do a good job and find a clever way around the course.”

Ordinarily, says Tim, “he’s one of mine that I can actually put together in the trot and do a little bit of a fancy step, actually. And that’s quite fun, and it’s something I use in the turn before a medium. With a horse like him, with smaller movement, it’s so much about the transition, so I want to do a good job with the demonstrating the transition, and then go into a medium or an extended that I have it from the beginning and then maintain it. With something like Vitali, you can build on it and go for more, and the balance gets better, but I really want to set this guy up from that turn.

“That was my plan today: come around the corner and establish it, and then there was a canter step. And then to make the same mistake again… it’s a bit weird, but he’s a bit of a weird chap!”

With two early mistakes on his score sheet, Tim had to quickly reestablish his own headspace.

“The movement’s gone, and it’s almost me that has to recover more than him, because you come around to the first shoulder-in thinking, ‘well, you’ve well and truly fucked it now, haven’t you?’” he laughs. “You think, ‘is there any point in even trying to do a good shoulder-in?’ But actually, he was good everywhere else, and he’s got a very safe, reliable flying change, so everything else I was really happy with.”

The redemptive second half of the test allowed them to regain some purchase on the leaderboard, and they brought their mid-30s trotwork trend down to a final 31.7 for second place overnight – the gelding’s first 30s score in nearly three years.

Happy Boy comes into Luhmühlen with a fourth-place finish at Pau under his belt at the tail end of last year, as well as a slightly more complicated twentieth at Kentucky last spring – but his most recent run, in the CCI4*-S at Kronenberg, saw him retire on course after picking up 60 penalties.

It might not seem like a traditional entry point into a five-star, but it’s not Happy Boy’s first rodeo.

“It wouldn’t be him if he didn’t have a little blip, and we had one in our last run before coming here – and that’s fine, because we’ve done some homework and it’s a new day,” says Tim. “He had the same result [a 60 and retirement] at Saumur before winning Blenheim in 2024. Optimism serves you very well in this sport. It might have looked a couple weeks ago like I should put up and go home and forget about it, but you know, having a healthy horse at the start gate of a five star that’s been there, done that, and I’ve been there, done that, is sometimes 90% of the battle. The rest is just one foot in front of the other.”

Third place overnight is the domain of Great Britain’s Steve Heal and 14-year-old Hagonda, who he co-owns with Heather Chapman and runs with the support of the BettaLife Holly Hub, a pay-to-play experience group that brings eventing enthusiasts behind the scenes and into the fray even if traditional ownership is out of reach.

It’s not hard to see why ‘Holly’ might be a particularly appealing horse for them to get behind: she’s flown up the levels despite a late start in life, and was purchased for peanuts from a field as a backed but barely-ridden seven-year-old.

“A friend of a friend owned her, and she’d had some kids and various things, so Holly just got picked up and put down – she had about six months of work across the first four years of her ridden life,” says Steve. “The owner then texted a friend of mine and said she had a nice horse in the field not doing anything, and did she know anyone who was looking for a project? [Heather and I] went out to see her and thought, ‘well, she’s nicely bred – if it doesn’t work out, she’s not expensive, so she can become a broodmare or a fun horse for someone. I did a couple of laps of trot, attempted a canter, thought ‘this isn’t really going anywhere,’ so I just trotted her down the road and thought she had such a nice outlook that we’d give it a go.”

Since then, though, “she’s just carried on and on and on.”

The pair made their five-star debut together at Pau last year, finishing 30^th with a clear across the country.

This year, though her 33.6 is nearly bang-on the same score she received at Pau, Holly’s first phase has levelled up in consistency.

“She always classically used to go into a test and sort of not really let me in or let me ride her or things like that,” explains Steve. “Today, it felt like I could actually be quite brave in there, almost to the point where I was a bit like, ‘come on, Holly!’”

“Everything just feels a bit more secure [this year]. She just feels a bit stronger, and a bit more like there’s a leg in each corner. She’s always felt like a bit of a weaker horse – she’s very long, and it just now feels like when you ask her to shoulder-in, you actually get steps of shoulder-in, whereas it used to be like one step, then straight, then one step. There’s still loads more to come, but it just feels like she’s building on it all the time now.”

Like Hallie, Steve has a relatively new dressage trainer in his corner – four-time Olympian Richard Davison.

“I’ve been training with him for the last year or 18 months, and he’s just really helped, to have her whole body a bit softer,” he says. “She can get quite tight and tense when you start asking her things that are a bit harder, whereas he seems to be able to get so much out of her, but in such a relaxed, soft way. I’ve tried to replicate that at home, and when I ride her on my own, and it just feels like she’s taken it all in because she’s not stressed and wound up about it.”

Pathfinder Jonelle Price holds fourth overnight on a score of 35.5 with 2022 Pau winner Grappa Nera, who has often been tricky in this phase, but looked harmonious throughout her work today. We didn’t get a chance to catch up with Jonelle in today’s whirlwind-quick nine-horse dressage session, but she returns tomorrow with second ride Capitaine de Hus Z, who has been a frequent flyer in the 20s at four-star.

Ireland’s Sian Coleman rounds out the top five with Carrowgar Je Taime Max, who makes his five-star debut in just his third year eventing. The thirteen-year-old previously showjumped to 1.35 with Robyn Moran in the irons, before joining Sian’s string in 2023. She, too, began showjumping him for owner and breeder Gina Heaps, but before long, the pair decided to try him out in a new discipline. In 2024, he made his FEI debut.

“He’d just kind of reached his max in the show jumping, and I think Gina had just started to notice about the eventing model that there’s just a bit more diversity for the horses,” says Sian. “She loved the idea of him going out hacking and jumping random things and having a bit more variety, so she said, ‘we’ll just give him a try.’ I think he was going to go back and do a bit more jumping, and then we just did a few events, and he did really well – so we were like, ‘sure, we’ll just keep going!’ It just shows you that when they’re polite and they want to do it, it’s amazing what they can do for you.”

Today’s test was the rangy gelding’s first time in any kind of atmosphere, but he was wholly unruffled by the buzzy, busy main arena here.

“I’m used to producing them myself, and then you can think, ‘okay, well, they’ve been to Le Lion, they’ve been to Boekelo, they know about crowds’, but he’d done nothing other than some Irish jumping shows,” says Sian. “In a way, though, it’s quite nice, because he’s not had any bad experiences either – he’s just an older man saying, ‘huh, what is all this, then?’”

“I’m so proud of him,” she continues. “He’s come up the levels quickly, but he stays so with me. We know the changes will be expensive, because he has jumper changes, but he loves to show off and he has a massive trot. He’s just such a pleasure – today he did the nicest bits of lateral work he’s ever done, and on Saturday he’ll go cross-country in an eggbutt snaffle.”

This week marks Sian’s return to the top level after her five-star debut at Pau in 2018 with Kilroe Hero.

“It’s so cool to be back at five-star,” she says. “I only had a small taste of it, obviously, but it’s been hard work to come back. You see your friends go back year after year and think, ‘how do they keep doing this?!’ This is my third attempt now – sometimes horses have gone wrong, and there was some time out when I had [my son] Fred. It’s amazing many ups and downs there are along the way, and you just really need people around you who don’t waver when it goes a bit off-kilter.”

In Gina Heaps and her husband Emelyn – “I’m not the owner, I’m just the Colombian drug mule; I carry things and pay for everything,” he laughs – Sian’s certainly found the right sort of people. And in Max, there’s plenty of hope for the future.

“He’s proof that you can teach an old dog new tricks,” she says with a grin.

Tomorrow’s five-star dressage sees ten further horses and riders come forward, following the withdrawal of Australia’s Bill Levett and RNH Tom Tom R, who were accepted at yesterday’s horse inspection but removed themselves from contention this morning. You can take a look at the starting order here.

This morning’s competition focused on the CCI4*-S, incorporating the German National Championships, and after 23 tests, it’s Julia Krajewski who’s once again on top.

But her ride today, the twelve-year-old Irish Sport Horse gelding Tullabeg Platinum, might not be a familiar entity to many fans of the Olympic champion.

The pair posted a 27.2, one of just two sub-30 scores today, to take the lead, shaving over three marks off the gelding’s previous level best in a fluid, harmonious test that belied how tricky he’s previously found this phase.

“He’s been a bit of a funny horse to ride in the dressage, really,” says Julia. “In Germany we’d say he’s been ‘rumpelig’ in the trot and the canter and also, okay, the walk. It took a while for him to go from, ‘okay, I can trot along and canter along’ to working with some kind of collection and self-carriage.”

He is, she points out, “built with very straight hind legs, and we’ve had to figure out how to bend them. I’ve spent a lot of the last year really working on getting him more supple and getting him to come through, but the very positive thing is that he’s always trying. He doesn’t get tense in the arena and actually, he’s even better in there than outside, because he comes up a bit and you can push through. Today was his first time in this kind of atmosphere and he really rose to it – that was very cool.”

His owner, Michael Sperl, “is probably crying right now,” laughs Julia. “One year ago he was getting so many 33s and 34s, which is nothing bad but nothing special – he was a 6.5 horse. But I always said a 28 has to be possible for him because any horse that behaves can do a 28. We’ve come close to sub-30 a few times but just had a little blip here or there that gives us a 5, and so it’s very nice to do it today.”

New Zealand’s Sam Lissington sits second overnight with Delarado, who put a 29.2 on the board early in the draw. The pair were originally entered in the five-star, but Sam opted to swap the pint-sized Strzegom CCI4*-S winner into this class late in the lead-up.

“I wanted to secure everything for the Worlds and really focus on that,” explains Sam, who has some incredible strength in depth in her string at the moment but rates the twelve-year-old as a team horse in the making.

“She’s always under the radar because she’s not as flashy as some of the others, so she’s not leading from day one, but she can finish on it. She’s a quiet achiever and our Miss Reliability, so while we’re thinking about the future, she’s ready if she’s needed this year.”

Today’s test marks Delarado’s first four-star sub-30.

“We’re forever fighting for it, and she’s just getting to the stage now where she’s so established – she’s got no buzz about her; she just goes and does her job,” says Sam. “So it’s really nice to hit that milestone and break that barrier.”

Third place is held by British-based US rider Cosby Green, who rerouted the sixteen-year-old Highly Suspicious from Bramham after an uncharacteristic result in the dressage put them out of the hunt.

“It was 8 o’clock in the morning and really windy, and I think I tried to give him a little bit of the benefit of the doubt and perhaps underprepared him,” says Cosby. “His trot and canter work were lovely but we didn’t do too much walking in the walk, and it just wasn’t quite what we’re capable of, so I did a quick reroute. He’s working the best he ever has – it’s so nice to have a sixteen-year-old that’s still changing and evolving, and we just have to adapt and change with them.”

Today, that flexibility yielded a smart 31, their best score in a year.

“It’s so lovely here that we get to ride in the arena and practice, and he’s such a nervous horse that I can really just focus on giving him confidence in there,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any huge flaw in the work we’d been doing, or the preparation we’d been doing before the test – it’s just about being able to get him comfortable in the arena.”

The four-star will return tomorrow morning at 9.00 a.m. local time (8.00 a.m. BST/3.00 a.m. EST), while the five-star commences at 14.00 (13.00 BST/8.00 a.m. EST). You can follow along live on Horse&Country TV, and tune back in to EN for all the stories you need to know. Go Eventing.

Longines Luhmühlen: [Website] [Tickets] [FEI Schedule] [Entries] [Ride Times/Scoring] [CrossCountry App XC Map] [H&C+ Live Stream] [CCI5* Form Guide] [Ultimate Guide] [EN’s Coverage]