Smooth Schubert varieties in rational homogeneous manifolds of Picard number 1 are horospherical varieties. We characterize standard embeddings of smooth Schubert varieties in rational homogeneous manifolds of Picard number 1 by means of varieties of minimal rational tangents. In particular, we mainly consider nonhomogeneous smooth Schubert varieties in symplectic Grassmannians and in the 20-dimensional F 4 -homogeneous manifold associated to a short simple root.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 14M15, 32M10, 53C30.