INTERVIEW

www.horseandhound.co.uk

Peder Fredricson

SHOWJUMPERS can be elusive interviewees, but there’s no missing Peder Fredricson as I arrive at Olympia. He looms out of a 15ft billboard with Daniel Craig-like ruggedness, swathed head-to-toe in H&M. The fl esh-and-blood Peder is even better; less brooding than poster Peder, but smiley, funny, punctual and eff ortlessly eloquent (he speaks German besides Swedish and English, having trained in Germany for two years, one of them with Franke Sloothaak).

He is, on so many levels, very diff erent

gold — just as Nick and Big Star would have done in London under that format.

So was his silver medal bittersweet? “It was only a highlight — I wasn’t

bitter at all,” says Peder, before adding: “Well, maybe for fi ve minutes I thought about it.”

An Olympic focusPERHAPS infl uenced by his fi rst trainer, Jan Jönsson, himself an Olympic eventing medallist, the Olympics have always been Peder’s main focus. Between Barcelona and Rio he contested Athens Pic

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Sweden’s Olympic silver medallist and H&M poster boy tells Lucy Higginson about learning from Mark Todd and the need for more professionalism

to your typical British showjumper. But then he started life as an eventer, coming 14th at the Barcelona Olympics aged just 20.

You may know him best as the man who won silver to Nick Skelton’s gold in Rio; and then proved that even a bloke in breeches can deliver a “dab” on the podium. Ironically, if Olympic medals were decided on the same cumulative penalty system used at European Championships, Peder and his horse H&M All In — who had not lowered a single fence in Rio — would have won

24 HORSE & HOUND . 19 January 2017

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