The Great Dressage Horses: An Era-by-Era Guide

Asked to name the best dressage horse ever, the record book gives one answer: Valegro, who holds all three world records at the sport’s top level — Grand Prix, Grand Prix Special and Freestyle — set between 2012 and 2014 and unbeaten since. But dressage scores are not comparable across eras, and the sport’s own memory ranks its greats by more than percentages: championship medals, longevity at the top, and what a horse changed about the discipline and its breeding. Measured that way, the title has passed through a recognisable succession — from the post-war classics Granat, Ahlerich and Rembrandt, through the Bonfire–Gigolo rivalry of the 1990s and the Salinero years, to the Totilas revolution, the Valegro records and the current generation led by TSF Dalera BB and Glamourdale. This article is the era guide; full profiles exist for the four horses linked above, with more planned.

How greatness is measured

Four measures recur whenever the sport argues about its greatest horses, and they do not crown the same animal.

The first measure is the most objective and the most misleading. Judging conventions, test content and above all the horses themselves have changed so much that a winning score from 1976 — Granat took Olympic gold in Montreal on roughly 76% — says nothing about how that horse would fare against a modern field. The judging system has been stable in its modern form for decades, which is why the 2009–2014 records era can be compared internally; it cannot be compared meaningfully with the cavalry-shadowed sport of the 1970s. The other three measures travel better across time, which is why the sport’s pantheon is organised by era rather than by a single ranking.

The post-war classics: Granat, Ahlerich, Rembrandt

The first great horses of the fully civilian sport — the discipline that emerged when cavalry culture was converted to sport after 1952 — were championship horses in a world without freestyles or television deals, where greatness meant beating the same small elite at every Games and Europeans for a decade.

Granat, a Holsteiner gelding ridden by Switzerland’s Christine Stückelberger and trained by Georg Wahl, dominated the mid-1970s: European champion in 1975 and 1977, Olympic individual champion at Montreal in 1976 and world champion at Goodwood in 1978, through a run in which the pair went largely unbeaten. That a big, difficult horse blind in one eye could be systematised into the most correct Grand Prix horse of his generation made Granat the era’s argument for training over raw material. Ahlerich, Reiner Klimke’s Westphalian gelding, was world champion in 1982 and took individual and team gold at Los Angeles in 1984; his victory lap of one-tempi changes before a roaring stadium is conventionally credited with planting the idea of the competitive freestyle to music, which entered the World Cup the following year. Klimke’s six Olympic gold medals remain the standard for rider careers; Ahlerich was the horse of the best of them.

Rembrandt closed the era and opened the next one. Nicole Uphoff’s Westphalian gelding won individual and team gold at Seoul in 1988 and repeated both at Barcelona in 1992 — the first horse to take four Olympic golds at consecutive Games, a feat matched only by TSF Dalera BB three decades later. Light, elegant and expressive where the type of the day was powerful and workmanlike, Rembrandt is widely credited with shifting the sport’s taste towards the modern elastic horse — the model the warmblood studbooks were, by then, learning to breed on purpose. What the classics era established survives intact: the championship canon as the measure of greatness, and German-school training as its method.

The 1990s: Bonfire against Gigolo

The 1990s belonged to a rivalry — the first in dressage to function as public spectacle. On one side, Gigolo, Isabell Werth’s liver chestnut Hanoverian gelding: the great accumulator, with team gold at Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000, individual gold at Atlanta between individual silvers in 1992 and 2000, world titles in 1994 and 1998 with team gold both times, and individual and team gold at four consecutive European Championships from 1991 to 1997. On the other, Bonfire, Anky van Grunsven’s Oldenburg gelding (by Welt As): the freestyle specialist, winner of five World Cup Finals between 1994 and 1999, European champion in 1999, and — at The Hague in 1994, when the World Equestrian Games first split the individual titles — winner of the inaugural world freestyle title on the same day Werth and Gigolo took the Special.

Their duels structured a decade. Gigolo beat Bonfire for the Olympic title at Atlanta in 1996; Bonfire, aged seventeen, finally reversed the result at Sydney in 2000, and both horses retired soon after. Between them they embodied the era’s two changes. The first was the freestyle’s arrival at the centre of the sport — added to the Olympic programme at Atlanta in 1996 — which created a new kind of greatness that Bonfire defined. The second was the arrival of the purpose-bred warmblood: unlike the converted riding horses of earlier decades, Bonfire and Gigolo were products of the post-war breeding programmes, and their success poured value into the studbooks that had produced them.

The Salinero years

Anky van Grunsven’s second great horse carried the freestyle era to its pre-Totilas peak. Salinero, a hot, extravagant Hanoverian gelding, won the Olympic individual title at Athens in 2004 and retained it in 2008 — making his rider the first with three consecutive individual Olympic golds — and took four World Cup Finals (2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008) of the nine his rider won in all. In 2006 the pair set a freestyle world record of 87.925% at ’s-Hertogenbosch and won the world title at Aachen.

The Salinero era’s contribution was professional polish: choreography, music production and the campaign management of a single star horse became specialist disciplines, and freestyle scores climbed through the high 80s towards a barrier the sport had begun to treat as a law of nature. It fell within a year of Salinero’s last Olympic title.

The Totilas revolution

What Totilas did between 2009 and 2010 has a fair claim to be the most consequential eighteen months any dressage horse has produced. The black KWPN stallion, by the Trakehner Gribaldi, scored 92.30% in the Grand Prix Freestyle at Olympia in December 2009 under Edward Gal — the first score above 90% at the sport’s top level — and took triple gold at the 2010 World Equestrian Games, where his Grand Prix Special mark of 85.708% stood as the record until 2012. His extravagant, crowd-stopping movement made him briefly the most famous horse in the world in any discipline.

The revolution was economic as much as sporting. His sale to Germany in 2010, reported at around €10 million, remains the benchmark for the top of the price pyramid; and because Totilas was a stallion — almost alone among the horses in this article — his greatness was immediately converted into breeding demand on a scale the industry had never priced before. His later career was interrupted by injury and his stud record, honestly read, is that of a good sire rather than a self-replicating one; both halves of that story, and what they teach buyers, are covered in his profile. The barrier he broke stayed broken: 90% has been reachable, if barely, ever since.

The Valegro era

If Totilas redefined the possible, Valegro occupied it — completely, and then for longer than anyone expected. The KWPN gelding by Negro, produced by Carl Hester and ridden by Charlotte Dujardin, won individual gold at London 2012 — where Britain also took its first Olympic team title — and retained the individual title at Rio 2016. Between 2012 and 2014 he set all three world records that still define the sport’s ceiling: 87.460% in the Grand Prix and 94.30% in the Freestyle at Olympia in December 2014, and 88.022% in the Special at Hagen in 2012. The full record book, and the reasons it has not moved since, are set out in the records article.

Valegro’s greatness had a second dimension the records understate: reliability. He was essentially never out of the medals in his mature career, retired sound at the end of 2016 with every record intact, and died in December 2025 with all of them still standing. A decade of unbroken records is itself the era’s legacy — evidence that the marks of 2014 represented not a judging fashion but a genuine outlier, produced by a freakishly sound horse in a system that has stayed stable since. As a gelding, he left the sport no offspring; what his name did leave was retrospective value in his sire line, discussed below.

The current era: Dalera, Glamourdale and the road to 2028

The horses of the mid-2020s inherited a sport whose ceiling was set in 2014, and the best of them have operated just beneath it. TSF Dalera BB, a Trakehner mare by Easy Game ridden by Jessica von Bredow-Werndl, won individual and team gold at Tokyo 2020 and repeated both at Paris 2024 — matching Rembrandt’s four golds at consecutive Games — around six European golds (including triple gold at Hagen 2021) and World Cup Finals in 2022 and 2023. She was retired immediately after Paris and delivered her first foal in 2026: unusually among the sport’s greats, a champion whose genes enter the breeding population directly. Glamourdale, the black KWPN stallion by Lord Leatherdale out of a Negro dam, ridden by Britain’s Lottie Fry, became double world champion at Herning in 2022 — winning the Special and the Freestyle, and breaking 90% in the latter — then took individual and team bronze at Paris 2024 and the World Cup title in 2025, all while standing as an active breeding stallion.

Around the two headliners, the era’s cast is still forming. Wendy, the mare with whom Isabell Werth — the connecting thread of every era since Gigolo’s — won individual silver at Paris 2024 on 89.61% aged only ten, is the obvious horse of the next cycle; Denmark’s team silver at Paris confirmed the sport’s broadening top table. The 2026 World Championships at Aachen and the Los Angeles Games of 2028 will decide which of them defines the era. What the current generation has already changed is the profile of the great horse itself: a mare and a breeding stallion at the very top, in a pantheon historically dominated by geldings.

So who is the best dressage horse ever?

Honestly answered: it depends on the measure, and the measures disagree.

• By the record book, the answer is Valegro, and it is not close. All three world records, the Olympic Grand Prix record and the two highest freestyle marks ever ridden belong to him, set under the same judging system in use today and unapproached for over a decade.
• By championship arithmetic, Rembrandt and TSF Dalera BB share the summit — individual and team gold at consecutive Games — with Gigolo’s four Olympic golds, two world titles and four European doubles as the deepest single career haul.
• By influence, Totilas changed the sport’s sense of the possible and its market’s sense of price in a way no other horse has matched.
• Across eras, no ranking is defensible. Granat’s 76% and Valegro’s 94% were awarded by different sports: different tests, different judging conventions, and above all different horses, because half a century of purpose-breeding has transformed the raw material. Comparing the greats across eras measures the sport’s development, not the animals’ merit. The fair statement is that each era’s best horse was as far ahead of its contemporaries as the next era’s — and that only Valegro’s margins can be verified against today’s scale.

If a single name is demanded, the record book is the only neutral arbiter, and it says Valegro. The sport’s collective memory, which weights beauty and consequence as well as marks, has never fully settled the question — which is largely why it keeps watching.

What a great name is worth

Greatness has a price attached, but it is paid unevenly, because of a biographical accident running through this article: almost all of the sport’s greatest horses were geldings. Granat, Ahlerich, Rembrandt, Bonfire, Gigolo, Salinero and Valegro left no descendants; their names appear in no pedigree, and their value to breeding was indirect — Valegro’s records, for instance, retrospectively burnished the stock of his sire Negro and of the foundation lines behind him.

Where a great horse can breed, the market capitalises the name immediately and generously — and then, over a decade, corrects it against the produce record. Totilas is the standing case study: stud fees and foal prices priced as if he would sire his own repeat, followed by a settlement at “good sire” value, as his profile sets out. Glamourdale’s book and Dalera’s foals are the current era’s version of the same experiment, still running. For buyers, the practical rule is the one that governs all of pedigree reading: a great name one or two generations back is a genuine quality signal priced at a premium, and the premium is only worth paying when the horse in front of you shows the quality the name promises. The horses in this guide are why those names command the premium; the bloodlines section is how to price it.

Profiles of Totilas, Valegro, TSF Dalera BB and Glamourdale are published; profiles of further horses named in this guide are planned.

Sources

• British Dressage — World & British Grand Prix records, 2026. https://www.britishdressage.co.uk/get-involved/international-dressage/medal-history-results-records/world-british-records/
• Fédération Équestre Internationale — Horse of a Lifetime: Rembrandt, 2021. https://www.fei.org/stories/100-years/horse-lifetime-rembrandt
• Fédération Équestre Internationale — Horse of a Lifetime: Gigolo, 2021. https://www.fei.org/stories/100-years/horse-lifetime-gigolo
• Fédération Équestre Internationale — Germany’s von Bredow-Werndl and Dalera dance to Individual Olympic Dressage gold once again, 2024. https://inside.fei.org/media-updates/germany%E2%80%99s-von-bredow-werndl-and-dalera-dance-individual-olympic-dressage-gold-once-again
• International Olympic Committee (Olympics.com) — Double Olympic champion dressage horse Salinero dies aged 28, 2022. https://www.olympics.com/en/news/van-grunsven-dressage-horse-salinero-dies
• Wikipedia — Gestion Bonfire, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonfire_(horse)