After years of combining dressage with a job in the fashion industry, I made the decision that 2023 would be the year I fully committed to my primary passion: horses.

The horse bug, as they call it, got hold of me in 1991. My parents gave me a few riding lessons on the lunge as a gift and quite quickly one thing led to another. It didn’t take much to convince them of those lessons, because my mother’s two brothers had been riding for years and somehow, she believed that the love for horses had to be in my genes. In hindsight, she was completely right. On the other hand, I inherited my dad’s fanaticism and competitiveness. He was a top-tier soccer referee.

I have a very broad range of interests and enjoy learning new things wherever I go, but horseback riding has always been a constant in my quite diversified life. That’s why I’ve finally made the decision to give it my all. I’ve been training for years, putting in countless hours each week, with many highs and much more lows. But as the cliche goes, persistence always prevails.

I owe a lot to Crack C van het Vijverbos, a truly unique horse. With him, I was able to successfully enter the Small Tour level for the first time. When he was six years old, I began training him with the help of Jeannette Haazen and Hannelore Volders. In the meanwhile, Kristel Daelmans’ Kriptonyte van de Performing Stables has become crucial to my career as an equestrian. Actually, Kriptonyte was the first Grand-Prix horse I ever trained myself. Even though our first few years together were very tumultuous, Kryptonite has developed into a reliable Grand Prix horse who, like Crack C, has earned a significant place in my heart. To get Kryptonite to the level of performance he is currently at, I could count on the help of Carmen De Bondt and Jan Bemelmans. Since June 2023 I have been training with Anky Van Grunsven on a weekly basis.