PrintAkiko Yamazaki has only ridden her horse Ravel once in her life, but she remembers the experience clearly, even though Steffen Peters told her not to even bother trying.
“It was for my birthday, after the Olympics in 2008,” Yamazaki said. “And before I got on, Steffen said, ‘OK Akiko, don’t even try to remember the feeling, because you’re never going to be able to create it with another horse.’ ”
Yamazaki, Woodside, Calif., purchased Ravel in 2007 after an intense search for an Olympic partner for Peters, whom she’s sponsored for many years. The pair has since swept more major titles than any other partnership in U.S. dressage, and the past two years have been the proverbial ride of a lifetime for Yamazaki as well.
“Now, looking back, I can’t even remember what we were hoping for,” she said. “We were just so focused on getting him to the Olympics, and he’d gotten injured in 2007, so that was a very dark period for all of us. The fact that he even just made it to the Olympics was amazing, so everything else that has happened since then is just a huge bonus.”
Those happenings included winning the Grand Prix at the Palm Beach Exquis World Dressage Masters CDI***** (Fla.), the FEI World Cup Final (Nev.) and a historic clean sweep of all three classes at the Aachen CDI***** (Germany).
As a child growing up in Costa Rica, Yamazaki had no inkling that she would one day own a global dressage superstar, but she did get a taste of international competition at a young age.
“I don’t think that that was a goal that I had in mind when I started riding at age 6,” she said, laughing. “But my mother was a rider who had done pretty much did everything, so when I was a kid, I actually competed against her. Even though it’s such a small country and you wouldn’t really think of it as a horse Mecca, we actually did have international opportunities.”
Yamazaki and her brother competed in regional jumping competitions on borrowed horses throughout Latin America—Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic—complete with parades of flags and national anthems played.
While she was in high school, Yamazaki and her mother also participated in a dressage program.
“There was a company in Holland that used to sponsor European FEI judges to fly around to countries in Latin America, as long as a country had about four riders,” Yamazaki recalled. “So even though my poor horse was not remotely a quality dressage horse, my mother and I were kind of slapped together to represent Costa Rica. So my first Prix St. Georges was in high school. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I think I did show in front of an FEI judge!”
Yamazaki said those childhood experiences laid a foundation for her future, and taught her to believe in bigger possibilities.
“Even though it was a small country, if you really had motivation and worked hard at something, you were given a lot of opportunities,” she said. “We had some things that might not be available in a larger country where there was a lot of competition for the spots. So in that sense, I was very lucky in that I never felt like I had constraints and that I couldn’t dream big. Something was always possible.”
Yamazaki moved to California to attend Stanford University and later married Jerry Yang, who went on to co-found Yahoo! Inc. The pair met in 1992 while studying in one of Stanford’s foreign programs in Japan.
