Image: Bschorer Family
He is regarded as one of the biggest up-and-coming eventing talents: Niklas Bschorer, born 1994. If you ever get a chance to watch him – do it! I have rarely seen such a fine and relaxed training than the one Niklas Bschorer showed at the FEI European Championships in Aachen 2015. When we conducted the interview for Kopf & Zahl (head and tails), Niklas Bschorer had just finished a morning of training in England and was hanging out a little in a relaxed walk.
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He has lived in England for five years. “Originally I wanted to stay with Chris Bartle for just one year, like a kind of school exchange, but then that spell turned into something a bit longer.”
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years old is newcomer horse Call Me Tiger. He is very attached, and not without a reason: “My mother hand-fed him, because he lost his mother at birth.”
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His biggest success so far was taking ninth place in Luhmühlen this year.
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minutes is the distance from his current British home in Marlborough to Mark Todd’s stable, which is where he’s headed for jumping training every week.
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The twelfth jump at Badminton 2015 was not his thing: his horse stopped and Niklas brachiated back into the saddle from mid-air with such aplomb that this series of images became infamous.
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He switched from dressage to eventing when he was 14: “Until then my parents, both veterinarians and dressage riders, had been my trainers.”
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Niklas was 17 years old when he sat the British A-levels. Since then all he’s done was riding – “but soon I will study medicine in Germany.”
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square meters is the size of his apartment close to the stable where he rents boxes for his four horses.
I have been writing the column “Kopf & Zahl” (literally: heads & tails) for Reiter Revue International since 2012. I reveal a little more here – nice as it is to read a short interview, there are so very many additional nice things still to tell!