Trust Frankie Dettori to wind everyone up. Zara Phillips is nobly coping with an inquisition from a Swiss journalist on life as a royal. “We don’t have a monarchy here in Switzerland,” says the journalist. “So I was just wondering what you do.” The 11th heir to the throne patiently explains that she rides horses most of the time. “Not true, she rides around in a horse and carriage all day,” Dettori chimes in. “You must have seen it.”

The former champion jockey and the world three-day eventing champion are here in St Moritz to take part in the Chivas Snow Golf championships, billed as the world’s “coolest golf tournament” and certainly one of the quirkier sporting events in a resort once regarded as the playground of the English aristocracy.

This is the tournament’s third year under Chivas Regal’s sponsorship, the 29th in which orange golf balls have been hacked around nine holes of packed snow and across ice greens (known as “whites”) in the name of tradition. Though two Italians, Dettori and Costantino Rocca, are prominent in the celebrity cast, the madness is singularly British.

“The trick is to hit the ball straight,” says Rocca. Phillips, a part-time golfer at best, pars the first hole before taking a few forays off-piste and missing a few putts. But she has an eye for the game and a competitive will, so acquits herself with credit in her new part-time role as sporting ambassador for the sponsors.

At the turn of a year during which she could add an Olympic gold to her world and European titles, much sterner sporting tests lie ahead. Provided that she and the brilliant Toytown can reach the first day of competition in Hong Kong, the venue for the Olympic equestrian events, without suffering either injury or heat stroke, Phillips will be one of the favourites to bring home the individual three-day title, the most coveted gold medal in the equestrian arena.

Toytown is already preparing for the most important season of his life, cantering gently through the woods at Gatcombe Park and brushing up on his jumping. “It’s all right for Frankie,” she says. “If one of his horses goes lame, he has got another 200 to ride. I’ve just got the one.”

An injury to the 15-year-old Toytown would signal the end of an Olympic dream, as it did four years ago in the run-up to Athens, but this time there are some extra complications. Hong Kong in August, when temperatures reach 32C and the humidity is suffocating, is no place for horse or rider to be outdoors, let alone competing in an Olympics.

Helpfully, Dettori has pointed out that racing in Hong Kong stops at that time of the year because of the intense heat. Last week, the Swiss equestrian team pulled out of the Olympics when its top dressage rider, Silvia Ikle, who is ranked fourth in the world, said she would not risk her horse in such conditions.

“Yes, I do have concerns,” says Phillips. “But Toytown is my top horse and he is not going to get to another Olympics, and I might not myself. So what do you do? It’s difficult. I’ve racked my brains about it, but I know if Toytown was a person, he’d say, ‘Don’t be silly, let’s go’.

“We just need to get as much information as we can so that we can make the horses as comfortable as possible. You want them cool but not too cool, you’ve got to be careful about dehydration, but you don’t want to be pestering them all the time. It sounds a nightmare.”

Making a drama out of a crisis, though, is not the way of the most relaxed of royals. Imperceptibly, the landscape has changed for Zara Phillips; the royal who rides has turned into the rider who happens to be a royal. It’s taken a marked shift in attitude, the shedding of the odd tongue stud and the winning of a couple of major titles to persuade the wider public of the depth of her competitive ambition, but the transformation is now almost complete.

“I think we’re getting there,” she says. “It has taken a lot for the image to change. It’s good to be known for what I’ve achieved a bit, not just for being born into something. There will always be people who think I’ve been handed it on a plate, but they’re people who don’t understand a thing about it. If they’re going to be negative the whole time, I don’t want to know them anyway. What’s the point in listening to them?” More to the point, she has surprised herself with how desperately she has wanted recognition for her achievements from within her own family. She inherits an Olympic pedigree from both parents. The Princess Royal represented Britain at the 1976 Games in Montreal; Mark Phillips’s two Olympic medals, a team gold and silver, came 16 years apart, in Munich and Seoul.

Once a source of friction, her father’s tendency to be heavy with the criticism and light with the compliments draws a very different response now. “He works with me less and less at the moment because he’s coaching the US team, but he’ll come back and say, ‘You should be doing this and this’ and I’ll say, ‘Go away, you’re never here’. Everyone compares us, but we’re from totally different eras. But it would be good to win some Olympic medals as well, especially with my dad because he knows everything.” The accompanying eye-rolling reflects a growing confidence in her own ability to compete at the highest level. She is proving things to herself now, not wasting energy on kicking against authority. Toytown can take some of the credit for the blossoming of royal talent; so, too, can Mike Tindall, the England rugby international and Zara’s long-time partner, who has coached her in the art of self-control. Phillips won both European and world titles from the front, never her strong point, and was on the verge of defending her European title last year in Italy when Toytown crashed out of the showjumping.

Phillips blames herself for asking too much of a big question at one of the jumps after what was a gruelling eventing round on rock-hard ground the day before, but it augurs well for Hong Kong that she seems to thrive on the atmosphere within the Great Britain team.

In a sense, growing up in front of a lens has been the perfect preparation for performing in competition. The bigger surprise is that she loathes the camera and, as those who watched the 2006 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards would testify, is not one for speeches.

In private, she is open and ebullient, but the normality vanishes in more public settings, especially if she feels threatened by questions outside her profession or smells a whiff of patronage. Her lifestyle is more likely to be a quiet night in than a paparazzi alert these days. “The paparazzi? They’d never find us in Gatcombe, would they?” she laughs.

She would also like us to know that Joe Calzaghe, her successor as BBC Sports Personality of the Year, used the word “amazing” in his speech of thanks, too. “So I’m not the only one who says it,” she jokes. If, however, she returns from the Olympics with a gold medal round her neck, she will need to hire a speech-writer. “It’s a long way off,” she adds. “We’ve got to get there first. Then what you do on the day is either good enough or it’s not.”

From the freezing fairways beneath the Corvatsch mountain in St Moritz to the stifling heat of Hong Kong will be another journey of discovery for Zara Phillips either way.

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