TSF Dalera BB

TSF Dalera BB is the Trakehner mare who, with Germany’s Jessica von Bredow-Werndl, dominated championship dressage from 2021 to 2024: double Olympic gold at Tokyo 2021, double Olympic gold again at Paris 2024, five European Championship titles and two FEI World Cup Finals. Foaled in 2007 by Easy Game out of Dark Magic, she carried the sport’s most consistent winning record of her era — and carried it for a closed studbook a fraction of the size of the mainstream warmblood books. She was retired from competition after Paris and produced her first foal in 2026.

The mare, briefly

Pedigree

Dalera’s sire, Easy Game, was a Trakehner son of Gribaldi — the stallion whose most famous son was Totilas — out of the Danish mare Evita by Schwadroneur. Easy Game was named Trakehner Stallion of the Year at the 2021 Neumünster licensing in recognition of Dalera’s championship summer and the international breakthrough of another of his offspring, the stallion Hermès N.O.P.; he died unexpectedly in July 2023, aged twenty. Dalera came from his first crop. Her dam, Dark Magic, is by Handryk out of a Hohenstein dam — Trakehner blood throughout, as the breed’s closed book requires.

The Gribaldi connection places Dalera and Totilas in the same sire line, one generation apart, and makes the pair the two proof points the Trakehner article cites for the breed’s ceiling: the closed East Prussian book, numerically small beside the Hanoverian, KWPN or Oldenburg populations, has produced the sport’s defining horse of two different eras. How such influence is read in a pedigree is covered in reading a pedigree.

The partnership

Dalera was ridden throughout her international Grand Prix career by Jessica von Bredow-Werndl, based at the von Bredow family’s yard at Aubenhausen in Bavaria, and owned by the Swiss patron Beatrice Bürchler-Keller. The competitive record of the partnership’s mature years is the statistic most often quoted about her: from November 2019 until her retirement, the pair finished outside first place only five times in more than fifty international starts. Von Bredow-Werndl has publicly called the mare her “soulmate”; beyond that, the partnership’s story is best told by the results.

Championship record

At Tokyo the individual gold came ahead of Isabell Werth and Bella Rose; at Paris, ahead of Werth on Wendy and Great Britain’s Charlotte Fry on Glamourdale. The Paris title made von Bredow-Werndl and Dalera only the fourth combination in history to defend an Olympic individual dressage title, and their 90.093% freestyle was the only score above 90% at those Games. Alongside the championships sit seven German national titles.

The one absence from the record is a World Championship: the combination did not start at the 2022 World Championships in Herning, the single senior championship of their era they missed. Between the Olympic cycle and the World Cup circuit, every major title they contested from 2021 onwards, they won.

What set her apart

Dalera was a freestyle horse above all. Her biggest percentages came in the Freestyle (Kür) — above 90% at the World Cup Finals and at Paris — while her Grand Prix and Special scores, though routinely winning, sat further from the all-time marks; the world records set by Valegro in 2012–2014 were never in reach and still stand. Her freestyles, choreographed to tightly fitted music, were built on the qualities contemporary reporting consistently singled out: lightness, self-carriage and an impression of effortlessness — the “harmony of athlete and horse” that the collective assessment of a test is meant to reward. In an era when dressage judging faced public pressure over tension and force, Dalera’s tests were widely cited in equestrian media as the argument that the highest marks and visible ease could coincide.

She was also, notably, a mare at a summit long dominated by stallions and geldings — and a lighter-framed, blood-typed horse beside the mainstream warmblood model described in what makes a dressage horse.

The Trakehner significance

The Trakehner Verband registers a small fraction of the foals that the big German books do, and its closed book — only Trakehner, Thoroughbred, Arabian, Shagya-Arabian and Anglo-Arab blood — means it cannot import fashionable outside sires the way open studbooks do. For such a population to produce the outright champion of two Olympic Games is statistically remarkable, and the breed has treated it accordingly: Dalera’s farewell appearances included the Verband’s own Hengstmarkt at Neumünster, the annual licensing showcase, in late 2024. For the breed’s market, she renewed at the summit of sport what Gribaldi’s line had established a generation earlier through Totilas.

Retirement and breeding

Dalera’s retirement from competition was announced in late 2024, following the Paris Games; she was then seventeen. A ceremonial final freestyle followed at the FEI World Cup show in Basel in January 2025, before a standing St Jakobshalle crowd. She remains at Aubenhausen.

Because she is a mare, her breeding significance flows through her own foals rather than a stud-fee book — the economics are those of the broodmare, not the stallion, as outlined in the breeding industry article. She was covered in spring 2025 by Vitalis, a son of Vivaldi, and — reported as carrying the foal herself rather than by embryo transfer — delivered a black filly, Dolce Vita BB, on 9 March 2026. As of mid-2026 that filly is the first of what the sport-breeding world expects to be a closely watched produce record.

Sources

• FEI — Saying Goodbye to Darling Dalera, 2025. https://www.fei.org/stories/sport/dressage/saying-goodbye-darling-dalera
• FEI — Jessica & Dalera Retain their Olympic Title, Paris 2024. https://www.fei.org/stories/olympics/jessica-von-bredow-werndl-dalera-retain-their-olympic-title-paris-2024
• Chronicle of the Horse — Reigning Queen of Dressage TSF Dalera BB Retires, 2024. https://chronofhorse.com/en/article/reigning-queen-of-dressage-tsf-dalera-bb-retires/
• Eurodressage — Olympic Champion Dalera TSF Delivers First Foal, 2026. https://www.eurodressage.com/2026/03/09/olympic-champion-dalera-tsf-delivers-first-foal
• Eurodressage — Trakehner Sire Easy Game Passed Away, 2023. https://www.eurodressage.com/2023/07/10/trakehner-sire-easy-game-passed-away
• FEI Database — TSF Dalera BB, pedigree record. https://data.fei.org/Horse/Pedigree/Detail?FEIID=H0311490