Zara on a mission to follow parents to Olympics
By Alan Smith
(Filed: 08/09/2003)
Zara Phillips, whose parents, the Princess Royal and Captain Mark Phillips, both rode for Britain in the Olympic Games, put herself in line to follow them in Athens next year when she rode Toytown into second place in the Burghley Masterfoods International Three-Day Event yesterday.
Zara Phillips in action yesterday on Toytown at the Burghley Horse Trials, Stamford, Lincs
Miss Phillips, 22, has made a rapid rise through the ranks to the top of her sport, the ultimate test of all-round horsemanship. Only last year she was still riding in Young Rider (under-25) competitions, and by winning at Bramham in June earned herself a slot in the British squad for the European Young Riders Championships in Wiendorf, Austria, where she won an individual silver medal.
But her mother, then Princess Anne, and a year younger, made no less a rapid rise on Doublet, owned by the Queen, in 1971, when she rode in her first top level three-day event at Badminton in May, and that September went to Burghley and won the European Championship.
Miss Phillips, like her father, was a member of the Beaufort Hunt Pony Club, and with their team had her first taste of competition, in the Pony Club Championships.
That she was able to win at Bramham last year was all the more remarkable considering her riding was much curtailed in the spring by the Queen's Jubilee celebrations and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's funeral.
Her father, who is trainer to the United States team - winners of last year's World Championship - said at the time that he wanted her to join the official Young Riders squad so that she could benefit from more concentrated training than he had been able to give her.
Miss Phillips and the 10-year-old Toytown, which she bought four years ago as a novice, had their first experience of senior European competition at Germany's premier event in Luhmuhlen in June, and went so well that after the dressage and cross-country they were in the lead.
Not for the first time, the final show jumping phase proved their downfall, and four lowered fences dropped them from first to fifth.
Yesterday, again, they went into the show jumping in the lead, though narrowly, on the same total score as the eventual winner Pippa Funnell, 34, on Primmore's Pride. Despite having one mistake, at the treble combination, they held on to second place.
Across country on Saturday they were both clear and the fastest of all, which gave them the edge over Mrs Funnell, although this was their first attempt at a four-star level course - the highest in the sport. Miss Phillips said: "He is so easy to ride, once I get going. I made a couple of mistakes, getting too close to fences, but he saved me."
Both of her parents played a part in her plan of campaign for riding the course, as, she said, she had walked the course beforehand with each of them. Both are previous Burghley winners, with Mark Phillips on Maid Marion doing so two years after Princess Anne took her European title.
The Princess went on to ride in the Montreal Olympics, in 1976, while Mark Phillips was in the team that won gold in Munich four years earlier, and in Seoul in 1988. Miss Phillips must be high on the selectors' list for Athens, 2004, and she said, when asked if that was her aim: "I would love to go."
Whether or not she gets to Athens her international future, at the highest level, looks assured.
Miss Phillips, who has a cottage on her mother's estate at Gatcombe Park, lived with her boyfriend Richard Johnson, a national hunt jockey, at his home in Gloucestershire until last year. They have recently started dating again after splitting up. :flower:
