February 9, 2026 
At age 68, team gold and individual Olympic champion Nick Skelton doesn’t ride anymore, having officially hung up his saddle alongside his famous stallion, Big Star, one year after their 2016 Individual gold medal win in Rio. But his longtime partner, Laura Kraut, sure misses the time when he did.
“Oh my God, did I love having [Nick] get on and ride my horses. I mean, I just [loved] to watch what he did,” Kraut told Dani and Alan Waldman on the latest episode of Horse Bytes, the Podcast. “[Nick] could get on a horse and, literally, in 10 minutes, he can have them going unbelievable.
“Then I’d get back on, and I could feel what he’d done, and then it just made the whole process [easier]. I knew what I was sort of working toward.”
In a career spanning nearly four decades, Skelton has competed in seven Olympic Games, earned 10 European Championship medals, six World Championship medals, a World Cup Title, and more than $8.8 million in prize money.
In fact, the British rider still holds the equestrian high jump record for his country at 7’7”, accomplished on Lastic in London in 1978. And you don’t receive those kinds of accolades without knowing a thing or two about how to get along with horses.
“[Nick] had an incredible way of communicating with [them],” Kraut explains. “You rarely ever saw a horse that he rode have an issue with [Nick’s] hands. He could be as strong as anybody you’ve ever seen, and yet soft at the same time. The horses knew that.”
After becoming show jumping’s unofficial power couple back in the early aughts, Kraut and Skelton discovered that, having grown up riding on either side of the Atlantic, they could bring their unique experiences in the sport to the table, as well as some essential commonalities.
“When I met Nick, and we started to work together, I think he helped me with a different approach to riding horses. I knew the ‘American’ system—sort of the always-forward, always-galloping way of doing things. And he comes from that sort of old-English, Ted Edgar [school]: make them wait, make [them stay in] control—sort of [completely] different systems,” Kraut recalls.
“And yet, I felt like always we had—I can’t say similar styles—but [Nick] was a very soft, sympathetic rider, which is what I like to think is part of the American way. I feel like he just gave me a lot more tools in my toolbox to basically produce horses, and get them to the highest level.”
Another helpful tip when it comes to buying and selling world-class sport horses together? Having similar tastes in show jumping prospects.
“Okay, maybe [Nick] likes something a little bit different than me [sometimes]. But, basically, we always agreed that we have to both really like the horse, or we won’t [buy] it,” Kraut explains of their shopping process. “I can hardly think of a time when we’ve gone forward with a horse that one of us didn’t like.”
According to Kraut, perhaps the best example of their synergy is her celebrated (and beloved) Olympic mount, Cedric—a gelding she and Nick first began working with as a 7- or 8-year-old. “He was a little [15.2-hand] horse, and I thought I needed to gallop [the jumps] with him,” Kraut explains.
“Nick was the one who said, ‘Absolutely, you do not gallop with this horse, you need to pull this horse together. You need to give him confidence by making him add down the lines—don’t worry about the time allowed. He’s got all the ability, but he’s not rideable.’
“And Cedric was not rideable at all then,” Kraut agrees, adding that their protocol with the Holsteiner gelding became making him wait at the jumps, while also focusing on having him listen to what Kraut was asking of him. “I think Nick was definitely the key to me learning how to ride Cedric, and it worked.”
In fact, it worked so well that the pair brought home a team Olympic gold medal in Beijing in 2008, going on to win four, LGCT Grand Prix events—and becoming the first pair ever to earn back-to-back victories at events in Chantilly and Valkenswaard in 2010. But if Cedric was Kraut’s self-proclaimed “favorite” horse, in her own way, she paid Skelton back in kind.
After all, it was Kraut who first spotted Skelton’s own world-famous Olympic partner Big Star at a horse show as a five-year-old in 2008, then under the saddle of Alan Waldman. That summer, Kraut brought Nick back with her to Europe to see the talented stallion for himself.
The rest, and they say, is history.
“I think we’ve been able to work sort of back-and-forth, and bounce ideas off each other,” Kraut says of their relationship. “And I do think that [Nick] took my riding or my system to the next level.
“When you’re hanging around with somebody like [Nick], who’s just—I don’t even know what you call him! He is a savant; he’s an off-the-charts athlete competitor. You hope that some of that rubs off on you.”
Watch Laura Kraut’s full interview with Dani and Alan Waldman on Horse Bytes, the Podcast:
