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SIDELINESMAGAZINE | September 2026
26
NADINE
SCHWARTSMAN
Building Her Dream and
Giving Dressage a Leg Up in Idaho
By Lindsay Berreth • Portraits by Carrie Grant
adine Schwartsman can hardly believe she’s living her
American dream. After moving to the U.S. in 2007 as a
19-year-old looking for a way to kickstart her professional
dressage career, she eventually found herself in Idaho, where
she’s built her dream farm and business, Les Bois Dressage, and
transformed the dressage scene in the area.
“It all happened pretty organically,” Nadine said. “There’s that
saying; if you build it, they will come. They came, and we were full
within three months and expanded five times to add more stalls. I
think a lot of people didn’t even know what dressage was, or that it
was an option. And then, once they were exposed to it, they were
very interested in it—there was definitely interest, and there was a
need. I let anybody come with any quality horse or any breed horse,
and we just trained what we had, and I still do that to this day.”
While Nadine has big goals for her career with horses like Royal
Flash R, Kelli Hajjar’s 15-year-old Rhinelander gelding who recently
won the CDI3* Grand Prix and Grand Prix freestyle at the HITS
Del Mar National in April, she says she likes to focus on what she
has, not what she doesn’t.
“I have really lofty goals: I want to go to the Olympics; I want to
represent the U.S.,” she said. “But I’ve never waited for a big sponsor
to come along who may never come. I focus on the horses that I do
have, and what that is, for the most part, is amateur horses and so
that’s been a really good win-win situation for me and the owners.”
FROM GERMANY TO THE U.S.
Growing up in Germany outside of the small town of Trier near
the Luxembourg border, Nadine was introduced to riding when
her mother, who’d taken some lessons as a teenager, decided she
wanted to get back into horses. She bought a Norwegian Fjord and
an Icelandic horse for 500 Deutsch Mark, and the family kept them
in a pasture down the road from their townhouse. Nadine rode in
her first show on the Fjord when she was 5 and came in last place,
but was hooked.
During that time, she and her family attended a stallion show
and she was awed by a Grand Prix rider showing off a stallion in the
ring. “I told my parents, ‘That’s what I’m going to do when I grow
up; I’m going to be a Grand Prix rider.’ They told me that’s only for
rich people, and we were very much not rich, and that I needed to
adjust my expectations.”