Charlotte Dujardin called her 2018 memoir The Girl on the Dancing Horse, seeming to acknowledge she had almost, but not quite, become a household name. There was a chance that profile could have stepped up again after the Paris Olympics as she targeted a medal that would have put her top of the list of female British Olympians.

Her chance at making history has gone before the Games have even started. The 39-year-old has withdrawn after a video taken four years ago emerged, which she said showed her making “an error of judgment” by allegedly mistreating a horse during a coaching session. She has been provisionally banned for six months by the International Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI).

“What happened was completely out of character and does not reflect how I train my horses or coach my pupils, however there is no excuse,” Dujardin said. “I am deeply ashamed and should have set a better example in that moment.”

The move brings her meteoric rise down with a crash. She started the 2012 Olympics in London as a sporting unknown, but left with two gold medals as she and her dancing horse, Valegro, charmed the public. Dujardin added a gold and a silver at the Rio Games four years later and took two bronze medals in Tokyo three years ago, leaving her with six medals, the same number as Laura Kenny, although Kenny has more gold (five).

Coming from a modest background, born in Enfield, north London, and initially combining her role as an elite sportswoman with a teaching job, Dujardin was an unlikely star in dressage’s rarefied world. She took up riding at the age of two, when she would ride her sister’s horses back from the showjumping arena. This sparked an interest in showjumping and by her mid-teens Dujardin was already a prolific winner at the prestigious Horse of the Year Show.

She was 13 when she first tried her hand at dressage, a discipline in which rider and horse perform complex, dance-like moves, such as the tempi, zigzag, piaffe and pirouettes. She bought her first grand prix horse, Fernandez, in 2007, with money left by her late grandmother, cementing her decision to direct her career in favour of competitive dressage rather than jockeying. But it was on the now-retired Valegro that she first entered the history books, with the pair securing all three of the sport’s world records.

Dujardin had been given training work with Valegro, who was co-owned by the renowned dressage trainer Carl Hester, and the pair were an instant match. Hester felt something special was developing, notably an extraordinary calmness under pressure – the secret to dressage’s precision, where the tiniest mistake can cost medals.

Commentators at the London Olympics reinforced Hester’s impressions, describing Dujardin’s connection to Valegro as “telepathic”. After that win, Dujardin spoke teasingly of her former mentor: “Carl has been doing it for over 30 years and, excuse my language, but he’s like, ‘You bitch! I’ve been working all my life to get a medal, you’ve done it in two years and you’ve got two golds.’”

She also had plenty of praise for Valegro, whose worth was estimated at £6m: “He’s like a Bentley to drive, so comfortable to ride, and yet he’s got the engine of a racing car and the brain of someone very, very intelligent. To find all of those things put together in a horse is very rare.”

By 2011, Dujardin and Valegro were part of the British team for the European championships in Rotterdam, where they took home gold. She has won five other European gold medals and two Dressage World Cup gold medals.

A decade later, Dujardin was expected to secure one more medal in Paris. Yet pending an FEI investigation, she has withdrawn from the competition and has said she will not comment further until it is completed. “I am sincerely sorry for my actions and devastated that I have let everyone down, including Team GB, fans and sponsors.”

The competition was to be the first when she would be accompanied her daughter, Isabella, who is nearly a year old. She took her to her first competition at nine weeks old, not long recovered from scars after a caesarean section. “I was really early back in the saddle – it was total madness,” she told the Guardian.

One unexpected benefit of having a child for a “very ambitious” person is that it has granted her a different perspective, she said. “Competing is just a game. Real life is spending time watching your baby grow and change, start crawling and rolling over.”