SINGAPORE – Tribiani loves snacking on apples and carrots, and he enjoys getting scratches around his ears and back.

But the 19-year-old Norwegian Warmblood gelding, also known as Joey, resembles a petulant child when things do not go his way.

All these quirks are things the horse’s best friend, Caroline Chew, knows like the back of her hand.

The 30-year-old national equestrienne said: “He’s a very mercurial character. From day to day, he gets moody or he can feel quite different. But that’s just his character and we’ve learnt to work together with it over the last eight years.”

It was their chemistry that led to a historic qualification for the 2020 Tokyo Games, making the pair the first Singaporean duo to compete in equestrian at the Olympics.

But a freak accident led to an early exit – Tribiani was found to be bleeding from his mouth, resulting in their elimination from the individual qualification dressage competition.

The traumatic experience was not what Chew, a Washington-based lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, expected in her first Olympics.

She said: “It was difficult to deal with. Obviously, no one wants that to happen during an Olympic Games that happens once every four years, and you don’t even know whether in the next cycle, you’ll be good enough to qualify again.”

Tears were shed but the setback did not keep her off the saddle for long. She continued competing in major competitions such as last August’s World Dressage Championship held in Denmark, where she placed 50th with a score of 69.146.

Chew, who trains five to six times a week, said: “The reason I juggle horse riding with a challenging career and commit so much time and energy to it is that I just love working with horses.

“And I’m very, very close to Joey, so I got back onto the saddle and continued to improve and enjoy our dynamic, which enabled me to move on from the incident.”

She is hoping for a second shot at the Olympics, kicking off her 2024 Paris Olympics qualification campaign with a circuit in the United States in January.

The pair have also qualified for the April 4-8 2023 International Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI) World Cup Finals in Omaha, United States. This is the first time Chew will be competing in the annual event, which has Tokyo Olympics champion Jessica von Bredow-Werndl of Germany in its line-up.

As she embarks on her journey to the Paris Games, Chew is keeping her options open when it comes to her riding partner. She bought her second horse, a 14-year-old Oldenburg stallion called Blue Hors Zatchmo, in 2022.

At 19, Tribiani has shown no signs of slowing down, achieving a new personal best score of 75.930 at the Global Dressage Festival in Florida in February. But competitive dressage horses typically peak between 11 and 14, and she is unsure if Tribiani will continue to perform at this level in the future.

Having spent a happy eight-year period with Tribiani, Chew said that “we’ve been improving on our personal bests bit by bit over the last couple of years – he keeps surprising me”.

She added: “Joey is still my top horse – we’ve gone through lots of different things together. We’re looking forward to milestones in the future.”