By Shehan Daniel

She may have just started competing for Sri Lanka, but Equestrian Mathilda Karlsson already sees a long future engaged with the sport in the country, far beyond her years as a rider.

Earlier this month Karlsson was the first Sri Lankan to take part in an Equestrian event at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, though an early automatic elimination, as a result of her horse Chopin VA refusing to twice jump obstacles on the course, meant that she could not achieve her goal of making the final round of the competition.

But having moved on from that experience, Karlsson sees a future where she is not the lone rider from the country on the international stage and is keen to do everything she can for that to become a reality.

“My dream is that one day we have a team, so that we can have riders that compete at the highest level. But to see that happen that will take years. It’s a plan that we need to create for the next 10, 15, 20 years. It’s not going to happen in the next five, six or seven years because it takes so long to get riders going. But it would be amazing if I could motivate people to be interested in the sport,” Karlsson told Daily Mirror’s SportsLine.

Growing the talent pool is a topic that Karlsson has already discussed with the Sri Lanka Equestrian Federation, and she’s willing to share her expertise and resources with budding Equestrians in the country.

“We need to send them to Europe and ofcourse it’s expensive. But I have a massive stable at home (in Germany) with many horses – I could definitely help with these kinds of planning and it will be my biggest dream to support Sri Lanka. In the coming future when I am done riding, I would wish for young riders from Sri Lanka to come and train with me. To see that happening would take years, but now the sport is getting a little bit more popular and everyone wants to become a rider, everyone wants to have a horse like Chopin,” Karlsson said.

“For the Asian Games, and the Asian Championships (in 2022) to have a team would not be possible. It’s just not enough time. It would be unreasonable to think that that is going to happen. But maybe for the Olympics in Los Angeles (2028) or Brisbane (2032), which would be in the Asian group, we should definitely have a plan.”
Reflecting on her debut for Sri Lanka at the Olympics, Karlsson said she did not feel any pressure ahead of the competition but reiterated her disappointment on her early elimination.

“I wouldn’t say that I felt pressure, but I knew that I had a very good chance to do well. I had this amazing horse and I was very disappointed the way it went. But, and I’ve said it before in interviews, if you watched the whole class you can see a lot of very top class horses and riders didn’t have a very easy run. Luckily my horse, even though he got scared, nothing happened to him. He didn’t get hurt. He was just scared in that moment, but he’s totally fine and confident again now,” Karlsson recalled.

“I didn’t expect obviously that that would happen, so I was very disappointed in myself. But I didn’t feel any pressure. For me to open up the world of showjumping to a new country, that maybe didn’t even know this sport existed is such an honour and an amazing feeling for me.”

Karlsson also said that the negative publicity the Equestrian sport was getting, after a coach of the German Modern Pentathlon team at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was seen punching a horse, was unfair.

“The negative media right now is from the Modern Pentathlon in which the last discipline is riding, but that’s not show jumping. That’s a totally different sport to what we do. They don’t even know their horses, they get 20 minutes to know a rented horse – that’s not working. That sport has existed for a long-time and they should have done something about it before it became a major issue in the media. It’s not fair for the horses and for the riders, because they don’t have the capability to actually know a horse, they are not horsemen. It is absolutely not what we do, this is a totally different sport,” Karlsson stated.