Riding Ellie McCarthy’s 12-year-old Oldenburg gelding Brave Heart II (Bordeaux x Ankie), Charlotte was crowned the 2026 British Grand Prix Champion following decisive wins in the Grand Prix and Grand Prix Freestyle. It was a third British Grand Prix Championship title win for Charlotte, having won in 2015 with Barolo and with Freestyle in 2020.
Charlotte and Brave Heart won the Grand Prix on Saturday with 75.044% in front of a packed stand of spectators.
“I feel like my canter work was definitely my highlight, and the pirouettes,” said Charlotte via British Dressage following the test. “He’s just getting more and more confident with me in the arena. When I first had him and started, I definitely knew there was much more to come from him, but it’s just being patient to find that development and get him strong. He needed to physically get stronger with all the work, and my expectation with him was probably quite high compared to what he was used to. I find as a rider it’s much harder to take over a horse that I haven’t trained. So, I’ve had to go back to go forward. And we’re still fairly new, we’ve probably done seven or eight shows really so it’s very little that we’ve done, so it’s just been developing and getting him stronger for the work.”
It was a star-studded podium as Gareth Hughes finished in second place with his own and Georgina Wilkinson’s Mowgli-Olympia MC (Rousseau x Rubin Royal OLD) on 70.457%, followed by World Championship team combination Fiona Bigwood and Donna Bella (Don Juan de Hus x Gribaldi) who scored 70.000% to take third place.
Sunday saw Brave Heart’s first ever freestyle with Charlotte in the saddle, and the pair rode to Gio’s music from the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games – a performance that earned Charlotte an Olympic bronze medal at the time. At the LeMieux Nationals, it earned Charlotte and Brave Heart a winning score of 79.400%.
“I love the music. I love riding to it; Tom Hunt did it for me,” said Charlotte via British Dressage. “It’s great to be able to ride it again because you sometimes think, ‘oh, because obviously I sold Gio, am I going to get to ride it again?’ So it was lovely to be able to ride it again.”
Charlotte reflected on how she felt the test went: “He didn’t know where he was going, what he was doing, so for him to go in there and us not make any big mistakes. The degree of difficulty; there’s a lot of pirouettes, a lot of piaffe turns. I did get a little bit ahead of the music at the start, so that was a little bit holding me back. But the canter work, he doesn’t make any mistake in the changes. He’s just so up for giving everything a go. When you go into extended canter, he’s like, ‘I’m off!’, so it’s great to have that feeling, and it’s just lovely to be able to do.
“All year I’ve been working on the Grand Prix and the Grand Prix Special and really trying to focus on that because that’s what really counted for [2026 FEI World Championship team selection]. So I really haven’t had the time to do a freestyle and it was just fun to come and do that.”
The freestyle top three at the Nationals was completed by Fiona Bigwood and Donna Bella, scoring 75.050% to finish in second place, followed by Gareth Hughes and Mowgli-Olympia MC with a score of 73.950%.
