Coachman’s Delight Home

What's it like to drive at a World Championship? Part 4: Seven marathon obstacles and what felt like a million ways to drive them. How course designer Michael Mayer's duplicate gates turned route planning into a maze, why the shortest line stopped being the point, and three days of walking-club dues to get every turn, landmark and call down cold before Saturday.

VIDEO: Watch our dressage test from the FEI Driving World Championship in Munich! Part 3 of What's it like to drive at a World Championship? Loretta brought everything she had. She was at eleventeen on the energy scale. Bonus content after the video: The One Thing That Could Have Improved Our Score.

What's it like to drive at a World Championship? Part 2: A cranky dragon on the autobahn. The moment it sinks in that all 85 drivers are in your division. Then big gets even bigger, Bavarian style. Don't miss the joy!

What's it like to drive at a World Championship? Part 1: You gotta start by raising the baseline.

These days, Loretta and I are training in a dressage field on the edge of Steensel, Netherlands. A few lessons here handed me a humbling reminder: I didn't need to know more—I needed to use what I already knew, and drive it proactively.

Our first European CDE turned out to be equal parts horse show and wine country getaway. We had a dragon-wrapped rental truck, a rented cones carriage, and just enough mud to work on our drifting skills.

It's official — US Equestrian has announced that we will be on the Defender U.S. Driving Team for the 2026 FEI Driving World Championship for Single Horses in Munich, Germany.