Rheinberg lies thirty kilometers north of my home town on the Rhine. It has about 30,000 inhabitants – and two famous daughters. Pretty much everyone probably knows top model Claudia Schiffer – Isabell Werth maybe needs a few words of explanation. Born in 1969, she won her first European Championship in dressage (team and individual gold) aged 22, an age when most young riders just begin the transition to Grand Prix level. One year later, in 1992, she won Olympic team gold and individual silver in Barcelona. During the following decade, she was a member of every German team competing at Olympic Games and European respectively World Championships. Her duels with her main competitor, Dutch champion Anky van Grunsven, are legend, and together (or against each other), these two took dressage to new levels. But it was Isabell who earned and continuously defended the title of the World's most successful dressage rider.

If you look at the German teams in Athens 2004 and at the European Championships in 2005, though, Isabell is missing. What happened? In the fall of 2000, following the Sydney Olympic Games, Isabell's multi-medal-winning horse Gigolo was retired at 17. Like every top rider, Isabell had been looking for – and found – a successor, but then Satchmo, as the youngster was called, decided to take a detour. In 2003, he won European team gold aged nine, which is fairly young for a dressage horse. But when the aim was Athens a year later, Satchmo denied his rider the much-needed cooperation. Of course Isabell never really disappeared from the international scene, but she had to fight for her position. And since in horse top sports, impatience simply doesn't work as a way to lasting success, Isabell Werth used these years to hone her skills – to become what she is today: not only the World's most successful dressage rider, but the World's best dressage rider.

"Satchmo has taught me humbleness", an overjoyed Isabell said at a press conference when the now matured pair won the World Championship in Germany in 2006. Her tears of joy became the image of that competition, because that victory meant much more to her than just another gold medal.

In June 2007, the American magazine Dressage Today asked me to visit Isabell at home and take pictures to illustrate an article about her training methods. I left home on a brilliant summer morning – and arrived at her place twenty minutes later in thick fog. We decided to try and take the pictures anyway, and I had the awesome pleasure of watching a master performing just for me. When done perfectly, dressage is a dance, a controlled succession of tension and relaxation, of collection and letting go. This is not only how a Grand Prix test is designed, it is also how Isabell works her horses at home. In order to give the clearest possible illustration, she had saddled her World Cup winner Warum nicht FRH, a giant Hannoverian gelding of almost 19 hands who moves as nimbly under her as the much more light-footed Satchmo.

Three weeks later, Isabell and Satchmo presented their eagerly awaited new freestyle at the CHIO show in Aachen. "March with me" it is called, featuring music by Vangelis and the voice of Montserrat Caballe. It's not only a universal song for peace, it's also a very fitting motto for Isabell and Satchmo. The Aachen freestyle is one of the most prestigious competitions in the world, and Isabell's test was so sophisticated and difficult, not to mention dramatic and full of risks, that it is hard to imagine anyone might surpass it when she manages to do it without mistakes.

There's an amateur video of that freestyle as she performed it at the European Championships in Italy in August at http://www.myvideo.de/watch/2277408 . It's easy to see where she still wanted too much. But if working with a horse is a long road towards an elusive goal, perfection, Isabell Werth has come a long way on that road – here's to a successful Olympic year 2008.