He’s the Bomb

Get to know Jagerbomb, the homebred partner of 2026 FEI Dressage World Cup Final Grand Prix winner Becky Moody

Text and photograph by Jennifer O. Bryant

Dressage trainer and competitor Becky Moody, who operates Moody Dressage with her sister, Hannah, in South Yorkshire, England, burst onto the international scene when she helped Team Great Britain win bronze at the 2024 Paris Olympics aboard her homebred KWPN gelding Jagerbomb (Dante Weltino OLD – Udysee, Jazz). The solidly built bay—Moody describes him as an “older style” warmblood—emphasizes the steak over the sizzle: He’s not an extravagant mover, but his correctness and harmony with his breeder/trainer/rider sufficiently impressed the judges at the 2026 FEI Dressage World Cup Final in Fort Worth that they put him atop the leader board in yesterday’s Grand Prix with a score of 76.761%.

We caught up with Moody, 46, on a sunny, hot Texas afternoon on the rest day between the GP and the GP Freestyle final, and asked her to tell us more about the 12-year-old she affectionately calls “Bomb.”

On sire-dam matchmaking: I actually wanted to use Danone [as the sire]—he was so talented and had a good brain—but he wasn’t available. So it was a little bit like, OK, well, let’s have a look at his kids. Dante Weltino was about seven at the time, and I just really liked him. He wasn’t mega-flashy; he was just a beautiful horse, very correct. He seemed to have a really good temperament, and his offspring that were already on the ground—they were still really young, but they were looking quite smart. So I just took a punt, really, and used him and got Bomb.

On starting her youngster: I do quite a lot of ground work with our horses: They all long-rein quite a lot and do everything before we get on them. But he was not a jot of bother to get on. He was pretty perfect to back.

On Bomb’s training trajectory: He always found the work easy in the sense that he was always very balanced. I’ve never had to work particularly hard at balancing him, which is pretty exceptional, having ridden an awful lot of horses.

Even as a six-year-old, he would quite easily pick up a couple of steps of piaffe. As a seven-year-old, he’d do a row of twos [two-tempi changes] and ones because he just found it easy. I think he probably learned to do changes in about two weeks. They weren’t mega-expressive changes, but he could just pop them in.

But he didn’t have the best engine. He wasn’t very motivated. You just want to be like, Come on, guys, but it’s finding the key to turning that engine on. We had to work on the suppleness quite a lot—but I think that’s really related to the engine. If I’m honest, I think when he’s really motivated, then the suppleness comes more easily; but when he’s not so switched on, then you don’t have that energy to work the suppleness into. I think we did a lot of, like, really steep leg-yields in the walk, really making him sharp and reactive and crossing. And a million billion transitions.

On the realization that she was sitting on a top international horse: The point at which I realized how amazing he was, was the London International [Horse Show] of 2023. It was the first time I’d competed at London. The atmosphere was amazing, you know, home crowd, which is great. And he was just phenomenal. I think the crowd and the atmosphere, the energy, lifted him, and I had this horse that I’d only really had glimpses of in training. He did the best freestyle that we’d ever done, by miles. That was the point at which I was like, OK, you know, he maybe really is quite special.

On Bomb’s continued evolution as a Grand Prix horse: I’ve had quite a lot of horses that I trained to Grand Prix, but there’s not actually been that many that I’ve got to Grand Prix and then really had the opportunity to keep working and developing them. That’s been really cool for me because you realize how much they keep changing. As a nine-year-old, he was like a really solid Grand Prix horse from his first season—but how his passage changed between [ages] nine and ten, just because his body got stronger, was astronomical. He was able to be sharp, whereas his passage as a nine-year-old was a little open and a little flat because he just wasn’t strong enough to be quicker.

On feeding the fire: When I took him to Paris [in 2024], he really lost a lot of weight, I think because the atmosphere was so hot, and he was quite hot. He was electric; he was on fire; so he didn’t eat amazingly well, and I was having to work him quite hard because he was so hot. So I was thinking, OK, he’ll be away from home from two weeks to come here [to Texas]. I’m going to bulk him up a bit before we go so that if he doesn’t eat and he drops a bit of weight, he’s still going to be good. And now he’s just eating! I’m super pleased with how he’s come and coped here.

On Bomb’s future after the World Cup Final: Definitely Aachen [the 2026 FEI Dressage World Championships], 100 percent; it’s a team of four, and he would be a fairly strong contender for that.

As for LA [the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics], one of the reasons I came here [to Texas] was because I’d never flown a horse before and he hadn’t flown before, so I wanted to have that experience and tick that box. At the moment, [Great Britain has] a couple of really lovely young horses coming up that will be ready for LA, so it depends where they’re all at as to what the team will look like. Glamourdale is getting a bit older now; Lottie [Fry] I’m sure will have more coming along behind him. But I’m quite pragmatic about these things; you know, three riders [the current number of riders on an Olympic team] is not a lot of people.