They can compare bent noses now, Mike Tindall and Zara Phillips. “Mine’s not as bad as his,” says Zara, mock appalled. But a collision with the solid muscle of a huge forward or the solid bone of a horse’s neck? Painful, either way. “You didn’t cry,” says Toni, Phillips’s personal assistant, loyally. “My eyes welled up a bit,” she replies.
So Phillips is a little sensitive to the camera today — no pictures — and her voice is understandably a bit nasal. A baseball cap is firmly fixed to the golden head, whether by design or coincidence, shading the bridge of the royal nose. The day before, one of her younger horses — “my babies” — spooked at a dog on a routine work morning in Gatcombe Park.
Had it been Toytown, the horse on whom the 11th heir to the throne completed the double of European and world championship gold in the summer, there would have been no drama. Toytown is 13 and a wise old hand now, unspookable. But this was a four-year-old, at the beginning of the long trek to potential stardom, whose natural reaction was to hurl his head back. The movement is sharp and sudden, and if it coincides with a rider leaning forward .
. . Do royals swear? This one might.
Tonight Phillips will line up alongside Darren Clarke as one of the favourites for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, an honour claimed by her mother, the Princess Royal, 35 years ago.
Admittedly, this is a thin year for British sport and Tony McCoy, the 11-time champion jump jockey, nominated by Zara herself, remains bafflingly ignored by the wider sporting public, but there is no argument with Phillips’s candidature.
The measure of her achievement is that only two other riders in the history of three-day eventing have held the European and world titles at the same time — Mary Gordon-Watson and Virginia Leng. Bear in mind also that, at 25, Phillips has never competed at Badminton, the Wimbledon of three-day eventing. She is still in her infancy in equestrian terms.
First, the matter of the tongue stud. Worn in her high teenage days, it symbolised the rise of a new royal rebel, pretty, engaging and feisty. Zara was just plain Zara, not Princess Zara or Lady Zara, and the tongue stud was an ornamental tribute to the new era of democracy in the monarchy. All pretensions to privilege or title have been resolutely rejected ever since. Home is a converted barn in the corner of the Gatcombe Estate, cosy, small, a home she shares with Tindall, the England rugby union international.
The floor is covered with the paraphernalia of their twin sports, riding hats, muddy boots, rugby balls. It’s delightfully chaotic and utterly unaffected, very much a young couple’s first home. The tongue stud, though, is also essential to the sporting narrative, both in the way that we, the press, have had to reassess Phillips and in the way she has come to perceive herself. Much to her delight and surprise, she is a world champion now, not just the former owner of a tongue stud.
“It’s important to me to be known for something I’ve achieved, to read about what I’ve done, not just that I’ve gone to dinner here, done this or that, blah,” she says. “It’s just rubbish, isn’t it? It’s not even interesting. This is something I love doing, and, hopefully, I’ve proved I’m quite good at it. If you’re in the public eye, people will have a perception of you before they meet you. Hopefully now the perception of me will be different.”
Phillips ponders the idea that a life of press attention might in some haphazard way have prepared her for the moment last summer in Aachen, one of the most intimidating arenas in the sport, when 40,000 spectators and a sizeable television audience, including her grandmother, waited for the final, decisive, round in the world championships. There was barely room for error on the clock or in the ring, and to add to the nerves, Phillips missed the bell for the start of her round.
Panic might have set in right there; good, an excuse to fail. But she has developed into a steely competitor, a rider who thrives on the big stage. Apart from one minor slip through the final triple set of jumps, Toytown was foot-perfect, his rider no less so. Two seconds was the margin of victory. “It was probably quite good that I missed the bell, because I had to get on with it,” she says.
“Sometimes, if I jump last, I get a bit edgy, try and hold them back a bit, but I was down on time already, so there was no choice. It kind of helped.”
Yet this was the child who once pronounced, to the disgust of her father, Mark Phillips, an Olympic gold medallist, that she couldn’t showjump, who had driven both parents to distraction by the obvious talent she showed on a horse and the equally obvious potential she had shown for wasting it. She could have won a European championship by default, on the back of a lucky day. But nobody has that much luck.
Phillips won her world title the way proper champions do, the hard way, by leading the event at the end of the second day after a superb cross-country round and closing it out in the showjumping ring, where in the equivalent of his own punk years Toytown proved a liability.
The tragic backbeat to the triumph emerged only later, putting the courage of her performance into sharper relief. Weighed down all week by news of the death of her close friend Sherelle Duke at a horse trials in Brockenhurst, Phillips had promised the family and Duke’s boyfriend that she would win a gold medal as a tribute to the popular young Northern Irish rider. Victory unleashed an emotional torrent. “I just bawled my eyes out,” she recalls. “Sherelle was brilliant, the most loyal person to me in the world. She was such a happy person to talk to and liked so much by everyone. When she first came over here, she lived with me and was so supportive. She would have been one of the first people I’d have called after I’d won.
“Accidents happen in eventing, we know that and we accept it, but this was my friend. I hadn’t lost anyone close to me before and I wasn’t there, I was so far away. The strange thing was that we’d heard the news on the Sunday when we’d arrived in Germany, and on the Monday I just went out and rode, and Toytown knew there was something wrong. He knew what was going on because of the way I was. He was really chilled out, the most chilled out he’d ever been in the week of a competition.
“At the end I just felt a huge sense of relief. I went through the line and thought, ‘Thank God for that’. I’ve watched the tape of it just once, mainly to hear the commentators, neither of whom are usually lost for words, speechless at my showjumping. I don’t know whether I was grieving or not, but for the first three weeks afterwards it (the victory) didn’t sink in. Only recently, really, more and more I’ve come to realise what we’ve done.” The royal “we”, that is. Her and Toytown, the big chestnut who likes a sleep in the late morning and a decent audience to appreciate his brilliance when he’s awake. It’s the way they have combined and matured together that has made the difference, turned the daunting reality of having parental guidance from an Olympic gold medallist and a European champion into an advantage. In Toytown, bought in 1999, Phillips found a fellow traveller, an independent spirit, somebody who would judge her on ability. “I’ve been very lucky (in respect of people to guide her) but in some respects I’m like, ‘Too many people around me know too much’,” she says. “My parents never pushed me, it was always my decision, but there was too much information sometimes.”
Now that Phillips can place two medals of her own on the table, her father’s influence has paradoxically become more important. When he starts flapping his arms, his daughter knows what’s coming and begins inwardly to smile. It was not always so straightforward during the “absolute brat” days that Mark Phillips, now coach of the US Olympic team, recently recounted, the days before Zara began to listen.
“You have to work hard for a compliment,” she says. “He’d look at my world championships and say, ‘Very good, but . . .’ Earlier I wasn’t ready to concentrate quite so hard on what I was doing. You can’t stop people from being young; people have to decide when they want to focus, you can’t force them, and it’s then you get arguments and you might force someone to go off and do something else. They (her parents) were young too. I bet he was just the same.”
The confidence, the mental strength, never deemed Phillips’s strong point, has been drawn from Toytown, the way he jumped on the final day at Burghley three years ago when the pair almost thwarted Pippa Funnell’s Grand Slam — Badminton, Kentucky, Burghley — and the way he scrambled his hind leg out of the water during the cross-country round in Germany when his rider had made a fractional miscalculation. “When I got Toytown, I found a horse who I knew could potentially be very good and I had to do some work to get him there,” she says. “That’s when I realised what sacrifices had to be made.” An injury to Toytown almost certainly cost Phillips a place in the squad for the Athens Olympics. Beijing in 2008 remains the next ambition, and, beyond, the London Olympics, when she will be only 31.
The trick now is to find and educate another Toytown. That, as Zara Phillips knows well enough, can be a bruising experience.
