2008 Beijing Olympics Team Gold Medal
Cedric was one of the most beloved show jumping horses of the modern era, the small gray gelding who carried Laura Kraut to an Olympic gold medal and onto a generation of championship podiums. He was a Belgian Warmblood, born in 1998, and stood only about 15.2 hands, which is unusually small for a top international jumper. His size was the first thing people noticed about him, and the second thing was his extraordinary scope and carefulness. American show jumper Laura Kraut picked him out as a green seven year old in Belgium in 2005, paid attention to a feeling she could not quite explain, and brought him home. What followed was one of the great horse and rider partnerships in American equestrian history.
His career grew steadily from small classes to the biggest stages in the sport. He and Laura Kraut jumped their first international FEI competition together in 2006, and within only a few years they were on the United States team. Their crowning moment came at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, where the U.S. squad of Laura Kraut, Beezie Madden, Will Simon, and McLain Ward won the team gold medal in show jumping. Cedric was the smallest horse in the medal ceremony but jumped clear like the biggest. He went on to represent the United States at the 2010 World Equestrian Games and continued to win at the highest level. He took grand prix titles on the Longines Global Champions Tour in Chantilly, Valkenswaard, Lausanne, and Wiesbaden, becoming the first horse and rider combination ever to win back to back Global Champions Tour events in 2010. By the end of his career he had earned more than 2 million dollars in prize money, a remarkable total for a show jumper of his size.
He retired in a moving ceremony at the Wellington show grounds in Florida in 2017, at age 19. Laura Kraut has often called him her once in a lifetime horse, and the friendship between the two is one of the stories show jumping fans most enjoy hearing her tell. In March of 2024, Cedric was inducted into the Show Jumping Hall of Fame, with Laura Kraut also enshrined in the same ceremony, a fitting double honor for a partnership that defined the sport for more than a decade. Cedric is the kind of horse who proves that heart and try matter as much as size and pedigree. A small gray gelding from Belgium ended up jumping under the lights in Beijing, on the Global Champions Tour, and in the show jumping Hall of Fame, all because his rider trusted what she saw in him on a quiet day in 2005.
Sources:
Breed: Holsteiner
Sex: Gelding
Foaled: 1998
Country: Belgium
Colour: Grey
Owner: Laura Kraut
Rider: Laura Kraut
Accolades: Team gold in 2008 Olympic Games