Fernando Perez Soto | León (EFE).- The young rider from León Sergio García Bermejo has placed León on the international equestrian map, in the dressage modality, after he decided, at just 19 years old, to look for some of the best schools of this sport in Germany and the Netherlands, where he now lives, to achieve his dream of being an Olympian.
From July 13 to 17 in Falsterbo (Sweden) he will participate in a dressage Nations Cup event as part of the Spanish team made up of the Olympians Borja Carrascosa and Severo Jurado together with Cristian Tudela.
He earned this right after winning with his horse Hexagon`s Innuendo in the CDI-W Freestyle in Budapest (Hungary), on a weekend where he had also achieved third place in a previous event.
García Bermejo began in the world of horse riding when he was only six years old thanks to some classes that his parents gave him, seeing his love for horses, but it was from the age of 14 that this hobby began to channel him towards a vocation that he thought would It could also be your future job.
In fact, after entering the scholarship program -six a year- of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda in Malaga before he came of age, he decided to embark on a path that led him to leave Spain for “the best facilities for this sport”. , acknowledges in an interview with EFE from the town where he currently resides, Schore (Holland).
The rider from Leon flees from the “classism” with which this sport is usually labeled and defends that, in his case, it has only been about “desire, enthusiasm and risk, accompanied by a lot of work”, since he has never had own horse.
At just 19 years old, thanks to the support of a colleague, he decided to make the leap to Germany, where the sport of horse riding has thousands of practitioners and also more than numerous high-level mounts and began working for stud farms focused on both the competition as well as the sale of horses, once their dressage has been completed.
No gender categories
The next leap would lead him to the prestigious “Stal Hexagon” stud, in the Netherlands, where he now resides and from where he has started a path towards the international elite in classical dressage, which is currently dominated by the Amazons, with the British Charlotte Fry as the current world number one.
García Bermejo is proud that horse riding is, he stresses, perhaps the “most equal” sport since men and women compete without taking into account or distinguishing gender and this means that, for example, in the specialty where he competes there is a female predominance.
“Perhaps it should be more common in some disciplines to be able to compete between men and women, as long as there are no other differences, but the most common is that it is the Amazons who have the greatest tact and feeling with the horse,” he acknowledges.
This is precisely one of the virtues that adorn, he says, Spanish riders compared to other schools, fundamentally European, such as the German, British or Dutch “because the way of riding may be less methodical than in these countries, but if there is a plus, at least that is what they say, for a greater art and feeling”.
His first major competition will arrive in a few days on Swedish lands where he will try to take the first step towards his Olympic dream which, in the case of Paris 2024, may come too soon, but without meaning that he will give up because he prefers to “look in the long term and continue fighting tirelessly.”
García Bermejo defends, above the importance of the horse -in his case the favorite is “Hexagon`s Innuendo”-, the human factor “because the rider continues to be fundamental, although logically the riding is also important, but not predominant”. EFE