Glamourdale

Glamourdale is a black KWPN stallion, foaled in 2011, by Lord Leatherdale out of a Negro dam, who became double dressage World Champion at Herning in 2022 — winning both the Grand Prix Special and the Grand Prix Freestyle with Britain’s Charlotte “Lottie” Fry — and added individual and team bronze at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and the FEI World Cup Final title in 2025. He is the current era’s clearest example of the dual-career stallion: champion of the KWPN licensing at two and a half, world champion young horse at seven, senior world champion at eleven, and throughout it all one of the most heavily used sires in modern dressage breeding.

The horse, briefly

Pedigree and the young-horse years

Glamourdale’s pedigree joins two of Dutch breeding’s proven sources. His sire, Lord Leatherdale, stood at Van Olst Horses and gave the black type and the front; his dam, the KWPN preferent mare Thuja, is a daughter of Negro — the Van Olst foundation stallion whose most famous son is Valegro, holder of all three world record scores. Glamourdale thus carries Negro on the damline rather than the sire line, a distinction the pedigree tutorial treats as more than trivia: the damline is where breeders themselves look first.

His public career began in the licensing hall: he was named champion of the KWPN stallion inspection in 2014 — the licensing system’s highest accolade for a two-and-a-half-year-old — and finished reserve champion of his KWPN performance test the same year. The ridden proof followed through the young-horse championship route: in 2018, ridden by the then 22-year-old Charlotte Fry, he was crowned FEI World Champion of seven-year-old dressage horses at Ermelo with 87.050% in the final, his canter receiving a perfect 10 from the judging panel. The partnership with Fry, the British rider based at Van Olst Horses in the Netherlands, has continued unbroken from that title to every senior result below.

The championship record

Herning 2022 made him world champion twice in one week. Fry and Glamourdale won the Grand Prix Special with 82.508%, took team silver with Great Britain behind the host nation Denmark, and then won the Freestyle with 90.654% — a score that placed them among the small group of combinations ever to pass 90% at the sport’s top level, a threshold whose history is set out in the records article.

At the 2023 European Championships in Riesenbeck the pair anchored Great Britain’s team gold — the country’s first senior championship team gold since the London 2012 Olympics — and took individual Freestyle silver with a personal best of 92.379%, behind TSF Dalera BB and Jessica von Bredow-Werndl. At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games they won team bronze and individual Freestyle bronze with 88.971%; in April 2025 they won the FEI Dressage World Cup Final in Basel with 88.2% in the freestyle, after which the pair headed the FEI dressage world rankings. At the 2025 Europeans in Crozet they added another team silver.

The single movement the record is remembered by is the extended canter. It earned the 10 at Ermelo in 2018, drew 10s again at Riesenbeck in 2023 alongside his canter pirouettes, and became the centrepiece of his freestyles — the 2025 programme was even titled “Glamourdale Airlines”. Where Valegro’s fame rests on the totality of near-faultless tests, Glamourdale’s rests conspicuously on one gait, which is also precisely how his offspring are marketed.

The breeding career

Glamourdale has bred throughout his sport career, standing at Van Olst Horses and distributed internationally by frozen semen — the mechanism, described in the breeding industry article, that lets a competing stallion cover large books without leaving training. His crops are correspondingly large: in 2022 alone 76 KWPN colts by him were registered, and his foals have been a fixture of Dutch auction catalogues since his senior titles. In early 2025 the KWPN declared him a keur stallion, one of the studbook’s highest predicates for a breeding stallion.

The offspring generation is now arriving on the evidence ladder. Sons have been licensed or approved for breeding — four Glamourdale colts were selected for the second phase of the 2025 KWPN licensing, and the son Sondale was approved for KWPN breeding in December 2025 — while offspring have been selected for the world championships for young dressage horses and, as of 2026, his oldest crops are competing under saddle. What does not yet exist, simply because his first foals are barely a decade old, is a senior Grand Prix produce record of any statistical weight: on the ladder that the modern sires article sets out, Glamourdale the sire currently stands on licensing, young-horse and market evidence, while Glamourdale the sport horse has already supplied the proof most fashionable sires never acquire.

“By Glamourdale” in an advert

That inversion is his market significance. Most fashionable young sires sell expectation — licensing titles years ahead of any sport verdict — whereas Glamourdale is the rare current name whose own Grand Prix record preceded his breeding fashion. The premium on “by Glamourdale” is accordingly better grounded than most, and it is attached to a specific promise: the offspring are marketed above all on the canter. For a buyer the disciplines are the standard ones. The sire’s titles say nothing about whether this individual inherited the gait, so the gaits evaluation — hind leg, walk, the canter’s actual mechanics rather than its silhouette — decides; the damline behind the horse remains the more exclusive fact on the papers, per the pedigree tutorial; and the produce record, still forming, should be re-read rather than assumed as his crops mature. The name is a genuine quality signal from a proven source — priced correctly, as the Totilas profile argues for every celebrated sire, on what the offspring demonstrate rather than on the stallion’s own videos.

Sources

• KWPN — Glamourdale, KWPN database record. https://www.kwpn.org/kwpn_database?horse=p-483526
• Longines FEI/WBFSH Dressage World Breeding Championship, Ermelo — Glamourdale world champion seven-year-olds, 2018. https://www.ermeloyh.com/en/glamourdale-world-champion-seven-year-olds/
• Eurodressage — Charlotte Fry and Glamourdale Gallop to Freestyle Gold at 2022 World Championships Dressage, 2022. https://www.eurodressage.com/2022/08/13/charlotte-fry-and-glamourdale-gallop-freestyle-gold-2022-world-championships-dressage
• British Dressage — Paris 2024: Fry leads brilliant British results with Olympic Bronze, 2024. https://www.britishdressage.co.uk/news/paris-2024-fry-leads-brilliant-british-results-with-olympic-bronze
• FEI — Unstoppable Fry and Glamourdale crowned World Cup champions in Basel, 2025. https://inside.fei.org/media-updates/unstoppable-fry-and-glamourdale-crowned-world-cup-champions-basel
• Eurodressage — Toto Jr and Glamourdale Proclaimed KWPN Keur Stallion, 2025. https://www.eurodressage.com/2025/02/01/toto-jr-and-glamourdale-proclaimed-kwpn-keur-stallion