Johanna Hall

Dressage rider Johanna “Jook” Hall competed in three consecutive Olympics between 1960-68. On each occasion she rode the Lipizzan Conversano Caprice and they finished 13th, 12th and 14th respectively. Following her selection for the 1960 Roma Olympics, the British team had to hastily arrange for nationality papers as she was born in Rotterdam. Hall, then known as Carp, trained at the famous Spanish Riding School at Vienna in the 1950s, where she met British dressage coach and trainer Robert Hall. They married in 1958 and ran the Fulmer School of Equitation in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire.

Hall continued as a fine rider in her own right and won the 1962 and 1968 National Championship on Conversano Caprice on each occasion. Internationally, she won the 1963 Rotterdam Horse Show. That same year, Hall also captured the European Dressage Team Championship at Copenhagen with Diana Mason and Brenda Williams, and, in 1965, Hall became the first non-German to win the Hamburg Dressage Derby, also on Conversano Caprice.

Hall later became an international dressage judge and was originally selected to officiate at the 1980 Moskva Olympics, but judged at the 1980 Alternative Olympics at Goodwood instead. Hall was left partially paralysed following a brain haemorrhage in June 1985, and she died in 1996.