FROM A NORMAN FARM TO AACHEN GOLD

How a Selle Français mare from a small farm in Seine-Maritime carried Steve Guerdat to the one individual title that had always eluded him, and why her pedigree reaches back through more than half a century of French breeding to the horse that won his first Olympic gold.

When Steve Guerdat and Dynamix de Belheme cleared the final fence at Aachen on Sunday 23 August 2026, they secured the one individual title missing from the Swiss rider’s collection. Five clear rounds left the pair on 0.86 penalties and made Guerdat the first Swiss rider to win individual jumping gold at a World Championship. Belgium’s Thibeau Spits and Impress-K van ’t Kattenheye Z took silver on 5.60, while Great Britain’s Harry Charles and LT Holst Freda won bronze on 7.17.

The result completed Guerdat’s set of individual Olympic, European, World Cup Final and World Championship titles. For Dynamix, it added World gold to the European title she won in Milan in 2023 and the individual Olympic silver she won in Paris in 2024.

Behind that record sits a remarkable breeding story that reaches back more than half a century and connects, through a single French foundation line, to the horse that gave Guerdat his very first Olympic title.

The mare from Seine-Maritime

Dynamix de Belheme is a bay Selle Français mare standing around 1.70m, foaled on 21 June 2013 at Arques-la-Bataille in Seine-Maritime, in the north of France. She was bred by Frédéric Aimez, a farmer who runs the Elevage de Belheme with his daughter Laure, and who has spoken generously about her over the years.

By his own account, the first sign came early. Free jumped at home as a three-year-old, she stopped him in his tracks. He has recalled telling Laure to fetch a camera because he had never seen a horse jump with that much desire, ease and quality. She then won a free-jumping competition with what he described as incredible ease, and the offers started arriving. Rather than sell immediately, Aimez chose to secure embryo foals from her first, a decision that has since kept her genes at home in the breeding that produced her.

The sire line: Snaike de Blondel and Calvaro Z

Dynamix is by Snaike de Blondel, a chestnut Selle Français stallion foaled in 2006, bred by Michel Ruel of Haras de Blondel and later exported and renamed Grafton. He was no passenger himself, competing to CSI5* level and placing at 1.60m internationally, including a second place in the 1.60m at Spruce Meadows, Calgary, in 2016 under Canadian rider Hyde Moffatt.

Snaike de Blondel is by Calvaro Z out of Olympic Champeix, a mare by Vondeen. It is worth pausing on Calvaro Z, because his name causes regular confusion when tracing bloodlines. He is not the grey gelding Calvaro V who carried Switzerland’s Willi Melliger to Olympic silver at Atlanta and Sydney, though the two are often mixed up. Calvaro Z was a bay stallion foaled in 1987 who had his own top-level career under riders including the Whitakers and Jos Lansink, and who went on to a long and productive stud career. His strength and blood are exactly what Aimez says he was chasing in the cross.

Aimez has been open about his reasoning for choosing Snaike. He liked the Snaike family for its combination of Anglo-Arab and Thoroughbred influence, naming Vondeen and Jalisco among the ancestors that appealed to him, and he had already bred good, powerful horses by Snaike de Blondel out of blood-rich mares. In his words, pairing Calvaro’s strength with the blood and genius of the damsire worked wonders. That damsire is where the pedigree turns from good to genuinely notable.

The damsire: Cornet Obolensky

Dynamix’s dam, Soudaine du Montet, is by Cornet Obolensky, and there are few better names to have on the bottom line of a modern jumping pedigree. Foaled in Belgium in 1999 and originally named Windows van het Costersveld, Cornet Obolensky is a grey son of Clinton out of Rabanna van Costersveld, and he became one of the most influential jumping sires of the era. As a competitor, he reached the top of the sport with Germany’s Marco Kutscher, including European team gold at Madrid in 2011. As a stallion he has proved even more important, siring a long list of championship horses and standing consistently near the head of the WBFSH sire rankings.

His influence is now global, which is one reason this pedigree will feel familiar to breeders far beyond France, including those working with Warmblood lines in South Africa. Cornet Obolensky blood travels well, and it tends to bring the scope, technique and carefulness that Dynamix shows in the ring.

The damline: Ma Pomme, Pomone B and a thread to London 2012

Soudaine du Montet, described affectionately by the Aimez family as their “reine mère” or queen mother, is a tall, dark, powerful mare who came to them as a four-year-old from the yard of their friends Brigitte and Hubert Mazeaud, but what matters most is what sits underneath her.

Dynamix’s foundation maternal family, what the French call the souche, is that of Ma Pomme. Ma Pomme was a full sister of Pomone B, the mare on which Pierre Jonquères d’Oriola won individual gold at the 1956 World Championship in Buenos Aires, becoming the first French rider to take that title. That alone would give the pedigree deep historical roots.

The detail that lifts it, though, is a connection Aimez himself has drawn. This is the same maternal family that produced Starlette B, and, more remarkably, Nino des Buissonnets, the horse on which Steve Guerdat won Olympic gold at London in 2012. In other words, the two horses that stand at the summit of Guerdat’s career, Nino at London and Dynamix at Aachen, trace back to a single French foundation line, generations apart. For a rider to reach the top of the sport twice with horses from the same distant damline is the kind of coincidence that breeding history is made of, and it is not one Aimez engineered. He simply had the line, bred it thoughtfully, and produced a champion from it.

Relatives in the sport

The closest relative is the most direct. Cornetaux de Belheme, Soudaine’s first foal, is a full brother to Dynamix, from the identical Snaike de Blondel and Soudaine du Montet cross. Aimez repeated the mating deliberately after Cornetaux turned out well, and Dynamix arrived the following year. Cornetaux became an international showjumper in his own right, competing to 1.50m, which tells you the cross was no fluke.

The wider family is impressive too. Soudaine has since produced foals by a range of stallions, several of them retained by the Aimez family as broodmares, including a filly by Old Chap Tame and Madyna de Belheme by Balou Star. A son by Emerald, Harald de Belheme, was sold at the Fences auction and has competed with French rider Megane Moissonnier.

Dynamix’s own offspring exist thanks to the embryo transfers Aimez arranged before she left, including foals by Zirocco Blue, Padock du Plessis and Querlybet Hero. Two fillies out of her were kept at home for breeding, which means the line that produced her is being carried forward in the same yard.

One connection deserves a careful note. Some breeder material describes Vitorio du Montet as a sister or close relative of Soudaine du Montet. The publicly available pedigrees do not consistently support that exact relationship, so it is safer to describe them as horses from the wider du Montet/Jenlah–Arpège family rather than as full siblings. It is a family relationship rather than a full-sister one, at least as far as we can tell from the records.

The partnership with Steve Guerdat

Dynamix did not arrive at Guerdat’s yard by a straight road. As a young horse she was produced in the French classic cycle, ridden by Luc Demarcy, and it was the horse-finder Antoine Charlot who spotted her at a national show and alerted the dealer Juan Ramos. Ramos travelled to St. Lô to see her, tried her twice, and bought her together with Kevin Melliger at the end of her five-year-old season. Guerdat then saw her jump in Oliva, recognised something unusual, and arranged for one of his owners, the Cartossi family, to buy her for him to ride. He has had her since 2018.

The early period was not smooth, and Guerdat has been candid about it. For a long stretch he felt something was missing. The mare was always excellent in the ring but felt, in his word, empty at home. Every test came back clean. The turning point came almost by accident in 2021, when the EHV-1 outbreak stranded his string at Béziers on the way to Oliva. His father-in-law Gerard Marragou, a gifted hand on the lunge, asked to work her, and within two minutes had her doing everything he asked despite her never having been lunged with Guerdat. Marragou told him plainly that he had never seen anything like it, that she was a genius. That reframed everything.

From then on, Guerdat stopped schooling her in any conventional sense. His conclusion was that she already knew how to do everything, found the work boring, and only truly switched on in the competition arena. So he now keeps her happy rather than trained: she hacks out constantly, is lunged lightly a couple of times a week, spends time in the field, and is never worked two days in a row in the same place. His often-quoted line captures it well. In the warm-up, she can look like she has a small stride, no blood and no scope, and then she walks into the ring and turns into a machine.

The results followed that shift in his understanding of this special mare. She was second at the World Cup leg in Stuttgart in 2022, contested her first three-star Grand Prix only in January 2022 at the relatively late by European standards at the age of nine, then won four-star Grands Prix at the Sunshine Tour and Vejer de la Frontera in early 2023. Later that year, at just ten, she was the only horse to jump five clear rounds at the European Championships in Milan and took individual gold. Paris 2024 brought individual Olympic silver. Aachen 2026 brought the world title, again built on a wall of clear rounds.

What the story offers breeders

For our South African readership weighing which lines to chase and how to produce the results, Dynamix offers a few honest lessons rather than a formula. The first is the enduring value of a proven foundation damline: a family that produced a world champion in 1966 was still producing them sixty years later. The second is the role of blood and modern sire power layered onto that base, in this case Calvaro Z’s strength and Cornet Obolensky’s technique. The third, and perhaps the least fashionable, is patience. She did not contest a serious Grand Prix until she was nine, and her breeder took offspring from her before letting her go. None of this is quick, and none of it can be reverse-engineered from a single champion. It is the slow accumulation of good decisions across generations, which is exactly what makes it worth studying.

Key sources for this feature include the FEI, World of Showjumping (including Frédéric Aimez’s own account of the breeding), Horse & Hound, Horsesport, the Olympics, the IFCE studbook records, and the sire studbook pages for Snaike de Blondel and Calvaro Z. Where breeder statements and public pedigree databases differed, notably on the exact relationship to Vitorio du Montet, we have flagged this for readers.