Dressage Legend Willi Schultheis: One-Handed Pirouettes, Half Pass & Tempi’s

There are few trainers who have had as much of an impact on the sport of dressage as Willi Schultheis. His legendary training program influenced dressage around the world. Aside from that, the man is a legend on a horse in his own right.

Willi’s legacy is a lesson for all of the Karen’s in the crowd who think you have to had competed at a certain level to have an opinion on a dressage test. This man built more Olympic champions around than any other trainer of his time, however, he was never able to compete at the Olympics himself.

Check out the one-handed canter pirouettes, canter zig-zag half pass, and one tempi’s in this video where he is riding 6 time Canadian Olympian Cindy Ishoys horse Dynasty.    Not only is he riding one-handed but he is doing so on a horse that isn’t even his! He truly is the magic man of dressage!

For my OTTB lover’s, Willi Schultheis valued the thoroughbred for dressage and highly and his ongoing success with this breed
over several decades proved him right.

Willi Schultheis

In the year of Lörke’s horses’ biggest Olympic triumph, Willi Schultheis,  the 14-year-old son of a jockey from Hoppegarten race-track in Berlin, was scouted and began his apprenticeship with Lörke. Weighing too much t to follow in his father’s footsteps as jockey, Schultheis became Lörke’s master student in every aspect.

Schultheis learnt dressage on nobody less than Kronos and celebrated his first big wins at just 17 years of age on Moselländer xx and Pommerländer xx.

It would be Schultheis who stamped the 1950s and 1960s as a professional rider and also as a rider of highly successful German bred thoroughbreds, like the Vornholz owned Chronist xx (1952 Olympic team bronze medalist with Fritz Thiedemann), Pernod xx (by Marcellus xx), as well as Memor xx and Brillant xx (Rosemarie Springer).

Olympic Impact

As a professional rider , Schultheis was unable to take part in the Olympic Games, but horses and riders trained by him were involved in the 1956 Olympic Equestrian Games in Stockholm and the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome . A first highlight of his Olympic success was the silver medal in team dressage in 1956, when his student Hannelore Weygand , together with the students Liselott Linsenhoff and Anneliese Küppers from Otto Lörke, surprisingly became the first women’s team to be successful in Olympic equestrian sport. The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and theThe 1972 Olympic Games saw Willi Schultheis as coach of the Canadian team, which was able to achieve sixth place in both games. From 1974 to 1979, Schultheis was national trainer for dressage riding. During this time the German dressage team became Olympic champion in 1976 , twice world champion and three times European champion . Under Schultheis’ aegis, Warendorf was a world center of dressage sport, in which not only German riders trained, but also riders from Great Britain , France, the USA and other countries. For an Ariola record released in 1961he reported on dealing with horses .