West Michigan's 4-legged Olympian

FRUITPORT, Mich. (WOOD) - There are Olympians from West Michigan competing in London. But only one of them has four legs.

Trained in Fruitport,  Grandioso became an Olympic dressage horse for Spain at the Hampton Green Farm , a training ground for champions in the seemingly rhythmic dance.

Hampton Green has been raising horses for years that compete across the globe.

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"Dressage is the complete training of the horse simple as that, they can use it in their riding to make the horse more obedient and submissive," trainer Andrea Landis told 24 Hour News 8.

"(Judges) want to see the quality of the three basic gates - walk, trot and cantor," said Landis. "All these are done at a specific point at these letters you see in the arena. The movements are done at the letters, judges look at these movements if the rider does it at the right spot. If the horse listens to the rider, you want to see the rider not moving around a whole lot, just doing fabulous, fantastic stuff underneath them."

The idea in dressage is to make the rider merely a passenger in what is called horse ballet.

It takes 10 years of intensive training to get a performance worthy of an Olympian. Soon, at Hampton Green Farm, training will begin for an Olympian you may not see until 2024.

"There's a lot of potential here," Landis said.

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Hampton Green Farm's Grandioso III and Daniel Martin Dockx moved into the starting line-up for the Spanish Team at the 2012 London Olympic Games and began preparations for Thursday's Grand Prix.