Dressage greats Isabell Werth and Charlotte Dujardin may be favoured to have medals hung round their necks in the Olympic team and individual finals but they would be the first to argue their horses deserve one too.
German Werth will ride Bella Rose 2 and British star Dujardin the less experienced Gio in the team final on Tuesday and the individual event on Wednesday in Tokyo.
Both are chasing history-making milestones.
The 52-year-old Werth can become the first athlete to win seven equestrian gold medals.
For the moment Werth — who has a record Olympic equestrian medals haul of 10 in five Games — shares the record with another dressage rider, the late Reiner Klimke.
Should Dujardin, 16 years Werth’s junior, retain her individual title she would join Dutch woman Anky van Grunsven in being the only rider to win it on three successive occasions.
If Team GB regain the team title, Dujardin could conceivably become the only British female athlete to have won five gold medals in any sport.
Both have been blessed in the past with remarkable horses — Werth won three Olympic team golds, an individual gold and two silvers with Gigolo and Dujardin’s medal haul with Valegro includes two Olympic individual golds, one team gold, and a team silver.
Whether their present mounts will ever be compared to them time will tell.
However, Werth is at pains to point out the importance of the four-legged half of the partnership.
“I always say it is 60 percent the horse and 40 per cent the rider,” she told Olympics.com in 2019.
“Maybe at the end, when you are fighting for an Olympic gold, then you have five percent more down to the rider, to know how to manage the pressure and expectation.
“But without a horse you are nothing.”
Dujardin — who owns En Vogue, the ride of her mentor and team-mate Carl Hester — says those outside the sport may think it is as easy as riding a bike and that the rider just has to hop on and everything is ready to go.
“Your bike is your bike,” she told AFP. “All you do is set it up, it does not have a mind. These horses have a mind of their own.”
‘Forever and a day’
When Dujardin bought En Vogue as a three-year-old and she was told she was “crazy” because he was uncontrollable.
“Everyone thought I was crazy buying him because they were like, ‘You can’t catch him.’
“And then trying to break him in, he was wild. They were all like, ‘You’re going to die,’ and I didn’t!
“But he bucked a saddle clean off, and I went through a lot with him.”
The horse’s fiery temperament has been channelled, as his disciplined performance in qualifying on Saturday proved.
“He can do the difficult things, if his mind is relaxed,” said Hester. “I was just pleased with his overall demeanour.”
Gio’s inexperience, rather than his temperament, has been the concern for Dujardin.
However, the broad smile on her face at the end of qualifying showed how the horse nicknamed ‘Pumpkin’ had allayed those fears.
“That to me, tonight, was as good as winning,” Dujardin said.
“For me, where he is right now with his training, he couldn’t have done any more.
“And that to me, is like a gold medal. It was one of those really special moments, and I will remember it forever and a day.”
Should a double gold follow, that moment may be swiftly demoted to third place.