"It's fun and technical": two Geneva riders on their way to the Working Equitation World Championships

Two Geneva riders, Carène Riedo and Tirile Tuchschmid Monnier, are competing this week at the Working Equitation World Championships in Jerez de la Frontera. An opportunity to discover a hybrid discipline that is steadily carving out a place for itself in the Swiss equestrian landscape This summary may have been written with the assistance of generative AI. Learn more When she first set eyes on Samson Menezes in 2011, Tirile Tuchschmid Monnier bought him with the intention of making him an all-round mount, a "family" horse. The bay pure-bred Lusitano was waiting for her at a stud farm in the Camargue, where the Geneva native was on holiday with her family. "I was 40, had three children — it was no longer the time for me to buy a show-jumping horse. But I had discovered the Lusitano, which I found very classy and versatile. I wanted to try something new," says the rider who, since childhood, had been competing on the show-jumping circuits of French-speaking Switzerland. She had no idea that, years later, her beloved Samson would take her to the four corners of Europe to compete with the Swiss working equitation team: Germany, France, Portugal, Austria and the Czech Republic — and this week to Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, where the Working Equitation World Championships are being held from 8 to 13 September. It was during a training clinic with Pedro Torres — three-time world champion with his stallion Oxidado and current coach of the Portuguese team — that she discovered the discipline: "I found it fun, technical… unlike anything I had ever known."