Farewell to Daniel Coyle's Legacy

It is fair to assume that a horse with which both owner and rider competed in their first championships, competed at the Olympic Games for the first time and which has won as many Grand Prix and World Cup jumping competitions as Legacy has a special status. But that’s not the main reason why Ariel Grange says this mare has changed her life and that of her rider Daniel Coyle “in every way imaginable”.

A difficult legacy

In the spring of 2018, Ariel Grange acquired the now 16-year-old Zangersheide mare Chavantele Z by Chippendale Z. Around six months earlier, Grange had taken over the management of Lothlorien Farm. She was forced to do so because her mother Susan, who founded the sport stable in the 1970s, died of cancer in 2017. She had big shoes to fill and was by no means sure that she would succeed, she said repeatedly in interviews later on.

The fact that Lothlorien Farm is better known today than ever is largely thanks to the mare that Grange and her stable rider Daniel Coyle discovered in 2018 with Jeroen Dubbeldam and his partner Annelies Vorsselmans. She was the first horse that Grange acquired after the death of her mother. That is why she named the mare Legacy. Legs” more than lived up to the meaning behind her new name in the years to come.

Sports career

Coyle and Legacy hit it off straight away. They won a Grand Prix in their first season and came second in another. At the time, the mare was only eight years old and so it was initially CSI2* Grand Prix competitions over 1.45 meters. But it became clear that this horse would live up to Gange and Coyle’s expectations.

This was confirmed in the years to come. In 2021, they were nominated for the Irish team at the European Championships in Riesenbeck. It was the first championship for all three, rider, owner and horse – with Legacy being a finalist at the World Championships for young show jumpers as a six-year-old, still under the Belgian flag with Jerom Broecks. Legacy competed in her first “real” World Championships in 2022 with Coyle in Herning, where they finished fourth with the team.

In 2024, they were nominated for the Olympic Games in Paris. They jumped three rounds without any mistakes and were on course for a medal before the last round. However, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The mare lost a horseshoe and Coyle lost his stirrups. He gave up.

The last championships were the European Championships in La Coruña, where the pair won the time trial but did not compete again.

Legacy had nothing left to prove anyway. She won the World Cup show jumping competitions in Leipzig in 2024 and in Toronto and Fort Worth in 2022. She contributed to the Irish League of Nations triumph in Ocala 2024 with two clear rounds and to the Nations Cup victory in Calgary 2023. She won the London Grand Prix and other show jumping competitions in Aachen, Rotterdam and Dublin.

In total, she has led more than 20 international rounds of honor over the years.

“Maybe babies”

Now she was cheered on for the last time in Ocala by a crowd of spectators in the stands. In top form, “Legs” once again presented herself to the audience and accepted the well-deserved carrots from her rider’s basket.

Ariel Grange found fitting words for her horse when announcing her farewell on Instagram:

“Thank you, Legacy! You were so much more to us than any ribbon for first place or any great jump. You are everything to us and we are honored to give you the future you deserve full of green grass, lazy days and maybe a few babies.”