Corinna Schumacher, the reining champion who speaks for Michael and guards his silence

The most revealing voice in Netflix’s new film about Michael Schumacher’s first world title belongs to the person who has said the least about him in public for more than a decade. Corinna Schumacher remembers the weekend at Imola when Roland Ratzenberger was killed in qualifying and the paddock argued over whether the race should go ahead. “Micha said: ‘We shouldn’t race,’” she recalls. “But if they decide to race, then you have to do it.” She talks freely about the young Benetton driver. About the man who lives with her today she says almost nothing, and she has defended that silence in court.

That is half of her public life. The other half plays out in a covered arena not far from Lake Geneva, where she has built one of the most successful operations in reining, the Western discipline in which a rider steers a horse through a fixed pattern that ends in a long sliding stop. Horses she owns have won more than three million dollars in National Reining Horse Association prize money, a mark only one owner had reached before her, and her ranch at Givrins hosts the sport’s world championship.

She was born Corinna Betsch on 2 March 1969 in Halver, a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, and trained as an office clerk. In 1991, while she was the girlfriend of the racing driver Heinz-Harald Frentzen, she met Michael Schumacher. “My mother was completely against it,” she says in the new documentary. “Michael was always at the go-kart track and was always pushing others out.” The couple married at the register office in Kerpen on 1 August 1995 and in church four days later, in the chapel on the Petersberg above the Rhine. Their daughter Gina-Maria was born in 1997 and their son Mick in 1999.

Horses arrived through the children. When Gina was given a Shetland pony, her mother bought more horses and began showing them herself, first in Quarter Horse trail and pleasure classes, then in reining. She went on to collect NRHA European affiliate titles and an NRHA Intermediate Non Pro world championship, and in 2010 she won gold at the NRHA European Championship. Her own earnings in the saddle stayed modest, a little over 50,000 dollars. The arrangement that mattered, as the association describes it, was a handover: Corinna rode a horse for a few seasons, then passed it on to her daughter.

The business grew around that partnership. CS Ranch in Givrins, in the canton of Vaud, a wedding-anniversary gift from Michael, has operated since 2005 and staged the FEI World Reining Championships in August 2016. In 2012 she completed XCS Ranch, 460 acres in Gordonville, Texas, where Duane Latimer, the 2006 world champion, trains. The NRHA named her a Million Dollar Owner in 2021. She passed two million in August 2023 and three million in 2024, much of it won by Gina, who took the 2023 NRHA Non Pro Derby on CS Sailing Gun. “This is something that Gina and I have done together,” Corinna said when the first milestone came. “That has been the most important thing.”

The other door closed at the end of 2013. On 29 December, skiing off-piste above Méribel in the French Alps, Michael fell and struck his head on a rock. After months in hospital in Grenoble and Lausanne he was brought home in September 2014. Since then Corinna has addressed his health only in a handful of measured sentences. In the 2021 Netflix documentary Schumacher she said: “Michael is here. Different, but he’s here, and that gives us strength.” She also set out the rule the household still follows: “We are getting on with our lives. ‘Private is private,’ as he always said.” And: “Michael always protected us, now we are protecting Michael.” In July 2022 she and Gina accepted North Rhine-Westphalia’s State Prize on his behalf in Cologne, and she was visibly moved as Jean Todt gave the laudation.

That rule has had to be enforced. In April 2023 the German weekly Die Aktuelle ran a cover “interview” with Michael whose quotes had been generated by artificial intelligence; the publisher, Funke, dismissed the editor-in-chief and paid the family 200,000 euros. In February 2025 a court in Wuppertal convicted three men of trying to extort 15 million euros with stolen private images and medical records. One of them, a former member of the family’s security staff, received a two-year suspended sentence, which Corinna called far too lenient. “In my opinion, he was the mastermind behind this,” she said. “What still shocks me most is the betrayal.” In December 2025 an appeal court in Wuppertal upheld the verdicts.

The price of that discipline is that the family now shapes most of what the public can know about Michael. Both Netflix films were made with its support. A review of the new one on the German site motorsport-total.com faulted the film for documenting his conduct in 1994 without questioning it, and noted that Damon Hill, the rival he beat by a single point, appears only in archive footage. Corinna’s warm, precise testimony comes from the person with the most at stake in how he is remembered. What the record supports is plainer: she decides which Michael reaches the screen, and so far it is always the one from before the accident.

In Schumacher ’94 — The Birth of a Legend, directed by Christin Freitag and released on Netflix on 2 October 2026, she is the main new witness, with Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone among the others. She remembers the song that belonged to the couple in the early years, Paula Abdul’s “Rush Rush”. “When I hear it today and I’m in the car, I cry to myself,” she says. On the races themselves: “Michael knew my heart rides with him when he wins. But my heart also rides with him when he loses. My heart is always there.”

The family has grown around her. Gina, now married to Iain Bethke, gave birth to a daughter, Millie, on 29 March 2025, Corinna’s first grandchild. Mick spent 2026 in IndyCar with Rahal Letterman Lanigan in car number 47 and has signed with Meyer Shank Racing for 2027. The Swiss ranch now presents itself mainly as a base for classical riding, with the arena prepared for reining when the big competitions arrive. “This is not about dominating the animal, this is about being a team,” reads her line on the ranch’s website.

The biggest of those competitions is already on the calendar. Since reining left the FEI programme, the World Reining Championship has been staged at Givrins in 2023 and 2025, and it returns there from 5 to 10 July 2027. For six days the ranch Michael gave her will be the busiest address in the sport, and the house a short drive away will stay as closed as it has been since 2013.

Tags: sports, athletes, Michael Schumacher, Corinna Schumacher, Mick Schumacher, Schumacher ’94 — The Birth of a Legend

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