Anna Buffini, a double World Cup Finalist riding for the U.S.A., has decided to take a step back from competition sport.

In a tell-all interview with The Chronicle of the Horse, she discloses that the financial weight of high performance sport and the pressures of social media have become a burden to carry.

Photo – Anna Buffini and Fiontini at the 2024 CDIO Aachen (© Astrid Appels)

International Career Overview

The 29-year old California based Anna Buffini is a long-time student of Olympian Guenter Seidel. She is one of very few black athletes competing at top level in dressage.

Buffini began her international career on Sundayboy (by Kennedy x Zevenaar), whom she took over from Seidel. They became the 2014 U.S. Young Riders Champions. At the 2014 North American Young Riders Championships they won team gold, but withdraw from the rest of the competition due to an injury. They returned in 2016 at Under 25 Grand Prix level and won the 2016 U.S. Under 25 Championship.

In the early spring of 2015 Anna acquired the KWPN bred Wilton (by Jazz x Contango) in the stables of Patrik Kittel in Germany as successor, but the horse was challenging for her. They debuted in 2015 in the U25 tests and did a string of Under 25 tests in the spring of 2016, but the horse was so tricky and challenging for the young rider they decided to send him into the field to chill for a while, after a meltdown in the national Gold Coast Opener show in January 2017. Wilton was pulled out of retirement and retrained on the lunge like a 2-year old. They returned to the arena in January 2019 and did one more CDI in Wellington in February 2020, but the horse again gave her a hard time in the test. It was their last international together.

Read the full article at Eurodressage.com