When Isabell Werth talks about defining moments in her life, there are of course the many successes and medals as well as unique records at championships and Olympic Games. However, there are also times that have presented the dressage queen with great challenges or have pulled the rug from under her feet for a short time - for example the call from unscrupulous telephone fraudsters. In the second part of the double episode of the CHIO Aachen Podcast, Werth tells stories that she has never shared publicly before.

What moves a person like Isabell Werth, who has experienced just about everything in her life? A woman who can’t be rattled so easily? In the seventh episode of the CHIO Aachen Podcast – part 2 of the two-part episode – Germany’s most successful Olympic rider provides rare insights into difficult phases of her life. For example, she talks openly about the day she was the victim of a ‘shock call’: ‘A woman told me that my nephew had been in a car accident and had driven a woman to death and committed a hit-and-run. Then they put a screaming, crying young man on the phone and my heart immediately dropped.’

After a few minutes, the situation was clarified thanks to a few text messages between Isabell Werth and her team: Her nephew was at the yard at home, he was fine – she had fallen for phone fraudsters. ‘I would have been better off travelling there and catching these fraudsters with the police. Unbelievable,’ is Werth’s conclusion more than a year after the terrible experience.

Her doping ban was even longer ago, following the positive test of her horse Whisper, who suffered from shivering and was treated with psychotropic drugs before a competition – although this medication should no longer have been in her system at that time. During the same year, she also went through what was actually a positive phase: her pregnancy with her son Frederic. But in the overall constellation, the months were too much even for the tough woman Isabell Werth: ‘It was a really bad time, through which my family and a few friends really, really supported me,’ says the dressage queen in retrospect and can still take something positive from the whole thing: ‘This bitter experience ultimately also strengthened me and separated the wheat from the chaff.’

And, as we all know, countless happy and successful days followed in the life of the world’s most successful rider. Not least the year 2024, which initially did not appear to have such a successful outcome at the end of the year. ‘I was already sidelined at the German Championships,’ Werth recalls of her performance in Balve in June. Her new top horse Wendy was injured and she did not deliver consistently good performances with Quantaz. But then came Aachen.

At the CHIO Aachen in July, the exceptional rider once again showed what she and her horses are made of. A goosebump-inducing freestyle in the Lindt-Prize not only thrilled the audience, who celebrated the ride with standing ovations, but also Wendy’s rider herself: ‘This mare did everything and gave her all and it was simply marvellous,’ Isabell Werth still raves today. What followed was the team gold medal and silver in the individual competition at the Olympic Games in Paris. And with it the rise to become the most successful German Olympian of all time. ‘This is really something that makes me proud and makes me very happy, because it is an appreciation of a lifetime of achievement.’

You can hear more exciting stories from the dressage legend in the seventh episode of the CHIO Aachen Podcast. You can find the new episode here and wherever podcasts are available.