THERE is a special quality about the silence you find at certain big sporting events and sometimes it is a silence louder than a football ground in full voice. You find it at match point at Wimbledon, before the start of the 100 metres at the Olympic Games and at Badminton on the final showjumping day, with the destiny of the great prize being decided.

It can be an astonishingly loud sound, the silence of 16,000 people. You can hear the occasional click of a hoof as it touches a coloured pole, quieter than the snap of your fingers. You can hear the doleful clunk, a surprisingly musical sound, of pole striking pole on its sad journey to the ground. And you can also hear the sigh, voiced involuntarily, hardly audible even when the sigher is sitting right next to you. But when the small exhalation of breath comes from 16,000 throats, it fills the spacious arena.

The result of a year or years of work, the testing of a long-worked-for relationship between horse and human and a competition in which every aspect of athleticism, control and courage have been tested comes down to the question of fractions and sighs.

It could not have been closer. William Fox-Pitt was second, 1.6 penalty points behind Pippa Funnell. Funnell had been farther ahead after the dressage, but Fox-Pitt’s bolder and — crucially — faster round over the terrors of the cross-country course brought the scores so close that they were almost touching.

This is a sport full of extraordinarily decent people and no one would ever say he spent the crucial moments willing an opponent to knock down fences. Besides, the right winning mentality surely involves a desire to win by your own brilliance, rather than willing your opponent to let you off the hook. So Fox-Pitt set it all up with a round of quiet perfection.

It is strange to watch Fox-Pitt in action. He is a tall man, 6ft 5in, and practically all of it is spine. I have never seen a rider with his head so far above the saddle. It doesn’t look possible to ride with such a build, but Fox-Pitt does so with glorious sympathy and balance and his showjumping round was a thing of beauty. It was also a brazen, bugling challenge: beat that. If you want to win, you must be at least as good as that.

Funnell rode into the arena knowing that only perfection would do. The crowd, having clapped her in — for she is a lady greatly beloved — settled down in eager, anxious silence to see what she would do.

Showjumping can be a capricious sport. It all depends on how snug those poles lie in their cups. You can whiff a pole, barely skim it with trailing hoof, and it will roll eagerly, almost wilfully, to the floor. At other times you can whack it and it will bounce and, perversely, decide to remain in its place. And so the greatest annual prize in the sport of three-day eventing comes down to the whim of a pole.

Primmore’s Pride, Funnell’s big, powerful, strong-minded animal, took on the fences with an almost surreal calm. He seemed to move with a desperate slowness, but in fact he was eating the ground with that big stride. It was about Funnell’s accuracy and Primmore’s Pride’s care.

After three days, after a dressage test that sorts out gymnastic ability, roads and tracks that test endurance, a steeplechase that tests speed and power, a cross-country course that tests absolutely everything, especially courage, it comes down to the question of how much the horse has in him to care. And remember, he has already given everything.

But he must still care about whiffing a pole, care enough to make himself big and strong and round over a jump — basculing, horsey people call it — and care about making that extra effort to flick his hooves clear of those silly little poles that are really so much easier to batter out of the way.

There was a moment when Primmore’s Pride slipped and missed his footing going into the seventh fence, but he made an abrupt recovery and hurled himself over. From that moment, it seemed that the rest was a mere matter of destiny. The treble was faced and no sighs were required. Instead, it was time to swap silence for noise and patting and galloping and laps of honour.

Badminton is the most fraught event of the annual sporting round. The pre-competition atmosphere in the stables is a mixture of doing your A levels and having root canal filling. This is because it matters so much, and also because it is the most dangerous sport of them all. Only at the end can the tension be released and the silence turn to cheers and tears, and it is the best moment in the world. This was Funnell’s third win at Badminton and she won in the best possible way. Not because someone else failed, but because she is a champion.