February 5, 2026 
Laura Kraut rang-in her 60th birthday last November with a truly outsized accomplishment: a top 10 place in the Longines Rankings and her best Grand Prix season to date.
Earning three, 5* Grand Prix wins in 2025, seven podium finishes at 1.55m and higher, and more than €1.5 million in prize money last season alone, Kraut is living proof that experience continues to yield results in the show jumping arena. And yet, even as the pathway to the top seems to have narrowed for many young riders today, Kraut’s own Olympic story is an improbable one.
She was 19 before she ever rode a jumper.
“The jumpers, [for me], just ended up happening,” Kraut told Dani and Alan Waldman on the latest episode of Horse Bytes, the Podcast. “My beginning [in the sport] was in the pony hunters and then on [one], very good junior hunter. I did equitation as a side-gig, [but] definitely that was not my thing.
“I think that my goal then was to become a great hunter rider. That’s really what I wanted to do,” says Kraut, who formerly campaigned the famed Rox Dene.
It wasn’t until she picked up the ride on a “great little Quarter Horse” at age 19 that she entertained the idea of jumpers.
“The people that I worked for, Anne Kenan and Kathy Paxton, got him for me, and he was one of those rare finds—he never knocked a fence down, and he could go quick like a Quarter Horse, so I won a lot. I think that was when I thought, oh yeah, this actually I kind of like better than the hunters,” she said, adding that, back then, she’d always assumed winning an Olympic gold medal was “out of reach.”
“It took me a long time. I would say probably until my early to mid thirties, I rode far many more hunters than jumpers.”
That all changed in 1990, when Kraut, then just 25, was given the ride on an off-the-track Thoroughbred named Simba Run. Little did she know at the time that their more than 10 year Grand Prix partnership would launch Kraut’s high performance career—from their debut in a sweltering Germantown Grand Prix in Tennessee, to contesting the 1992 Olympic trials.
Even then, Kraut wasn’t a believer. She didn’t even hold a passport at the time.
“The owner of Simba Run [Geoff Sutton] wanted me to do the Olympic trials, and I thought, ‘Oh, well, that’ll be fun,’” Kraut laughed. “It wasn’t really because I thought I might make the Olympic team.
“So, when I did make the Olympic team as reserve rider, I had to get a passport so I could get to Spain. And that’s the first time I ever really saw the top sport.”
It was that moment, she said she officially caught the bug, and with the help of a syndicate, she embarked on her first horse shopping trip to Europe in 1998. “Up to that point, I’d only ridden mainly Thoroughbreds,” she says, adding that she found her first European-sourced horse, the 7-year-old Dutch Warmblood mare, Liberty, on that same trip.
“I bought her, and I told the people [who owned her], ‘You know, hopefully, we’ll go to the Olympics,’” Laura recalls. “Which, you know, what was I thinking?!”
Despite Kraut’s early confidence in Liberty, though, life had other plans.
“I’d bought the horse—I think she arrived to us in August,” Kraut recalls. “I rode in what was then the [inaugural du Maurier International Grand Prix] in Spruce Meadows in September, and I wasn’t feeling that well. Sure enough, I found out that I was pregnant.
“I think I continued riding until about November—so not that far in—but I had to call all the syndicate owners and say, ‘Um, yeah, well, I’m having a baby.”
Fortunately, Kraut says, her owners were incredibly supportive. When she returned to the sport the following June after having her son Bobby, she returned with a vengeance.
“What I will say to that end, is, [in] the whole scheme of things, it is such a short amount of time that you’re out [when you’re pregnant], and the reward, the payback, is so much bigger,” says Kraut, adding that she likes to joke to her son Bobby that he once jumped a very wealthy Grand Prix with her in Spruce Meadows.
“Maybe you drop a bit in the World Rankings, or maybe you miss a few events here or there. It’s easy for me to say, because I did it, but I strongly suggest that if somebody is sort of going back and forth on whether they should have a child or not, definitely, [I’d recommend that] they should.
“I would just say that everything improved after having [my son].”
One year later, Kraut was selected to travel to Europe and compete on her first international Nations Cup teams in the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Games. She was eventually named to USA’s Olympic team with Liberty—just as she’d predicted. It was the first of four Olympic appearances that would eventually lead to a team gold medal (2008) and two team silver medals (2021, 2024).
Decades later, Kraut’s star has only continued to rise. And while she admits that staying in the top-50 in the Longines Rankings is important in order to gain admittance to the 5* shows where she wishes to compete, she says the rankings, themselves, are a bit of an afterthought.
“I just miraculously [have] such great horses right now that I was able to keep winning with each one of them. I think that when you have numbers like that, and great horses, it just happens,” she explains.
“I feel like it’s always been my theory that I can’t think about ranking points. You have to think about your horses, [and] what’s the best place to aim them. Every time you go in, you’re trying to win. And if you’re not trying to win, you’re training your horse.”
And though Kraut may have followed a winding path to the Top 10 in the world, at 60 she’s proven her staying power. This spring, her son Bobby will turn 27, nearly the same age that Kraut was when she launched her own professional career on catch rides and hunters, an Olympic medal—let alone three—still very much a pipe dream.
“Definitely, my career went straight up, literally, after having [Bobby],” she says. “He was, and is, my good luck charm.”
Watch Laura Kraut’s full interview with Dani and Alan Waldman on Horse Bytes, the Podcast:
