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The horse double gold medallist Mark Todd wants to ride back into the Olympic arena has already starred on a different stage - taking top billing alongside a hip-hop star.
Gandalf starred in a Scribe video last year, dry ice, strobe lights, dancers and rappers failing to faze
the 10-year-old grey gelding.
Todd, who won gold in 1984 and 1988 before retiring after the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, announced this week that he would attempt to make this year's team.
The horse which has lured him out of retirement was not even for sale but within weeks of his former co-owner, Angela Lloyd, receiving a phone call from Todd, he was on his way south.
"I was excited that Mark Todd wanted to look at my horse, but at the same time I hoped he wouldn't like him."
Gandalf - owned by Lloyd, her partner Tich Massey and her grandmother Vilma Shaw - is known as Little at home, but there's nothing diminutive about his personality.
"He's a cruiser - he'd lie in the paddock and chat away, and wait for me to go to him, or I'd have to tempt him with a carrot," says Ms Lloyd.
The horse jumped his way to three-star success with 37-year-old Ms Lloyd.
She bought him as a yearling - "cheap as chips".
"He was in the run-ons in the Horsetrader - a little black insignificant horse," she remembers.
"He's a thoroughbred, paint, Australian stock horse by Pintado Desperado and out of Princess of Power, who was bred by Gail Rosenvear.
"But he's not a hothead like your typical thoroughbred can be. I guess Mark felt he had enough mileage and was fairly well established for him to finish him off and take him through to four star."
Ms Lloyd broke him in, trained him and brought him through the grades.
She is the only one who has ever competed on him or jumped him.
"If it wasn't Mark Todd, I wouldn't have said yes. I have been asked so many times before."
Little and Ms Lloyd placed second at their first three-star outing, the One Day Championships, just over a year ago, won the three-star Richfields in the Waikato and were second at the Manakau City Puhinui Three Day Event last year.
"The more I worked him, the more he developed and the more scope he got," she says. "It takes a lot of time to get a horse that is happy to be at that level and he was very confident - I think part of that success is because we took it slowly."
Little is very much part of the South Auckland family. Massey, course designer for the Puhinui event, is also missing the horse.
Ms Lloyd admits she's cried buckets of tears since sending her best mate off with Todd, but knows he is in kind and caring hands. "If there is anyone who can get the absolute best out of him, it is Mark Todd, and I guess I did think about New Zealand a bit."
But she almost pulled the plug on the deal.
"We will get to see how talented the horse really is," she says. "I'm just sorry it isn't me taking him to those heights."
Ms Lloyd feels there is nothing to stop Todd taking Little beyond the Olympics. "He's still a baby, so there is no reason why Mark couldn't get two Olympics and two world champs out of him."
Ms Lloyd and Mr Massey will be ringside at Hong Kong, where all the Beijing Olympic equestrian events are being held.
"We booked our tickets last year and have two weeks of tickets to all the equestrian events."
She's crossing her fingers she will see her Little make his world debut in grand style.
Experts back Todd's chances of comeback - Sport, D1
