Tom Crisp

Tom Crisp's sportsmanship at Badminton captured the hearts of eventing fans worldwide. Eleanor Jones finds out about learning to "fail forward", and making a top eventer of a tricky mare

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TOM CRISP'S four-year-old daughter Hermione is tired; she's had a hard afternoon's swimming.

"Did you do a width?" asks Tom. "Like Daddy at Badminton?" Tom became a hero after his fall back in May. Although his fabulous cross-country round on Liberty And Glory had come to a premature end  in the cold water of the lake, he showed his class and sportsmanship by pretending to do the front crawl in the shallows, then raising his arms to the cheering crowd when he got dripping to his feet.

"That's probably what I'll be remembered for," Tom says. "I went to buy a trailer the other day and the man said 'You're the guy in the Badminton lake. I thought 'How do you know that?' It wasn't even a horse trailer!" Tom is not one to whinge, nor look for excuses for his dunking, but as he speaks, he's booked in for an operation on his groin, which he injured in March.

"It was a young horse at home, just stumbled, and it went pop," he explains.

"I've been struggling, going cross-country holding my neck strap, because I'm lacking a bit of stability. You don't realise how much you rely on your groin and core - then the same thing happened at Tweseldown in late May and I've torn some of the muscle in my shoulder. I've fallen off more times in the past month than I have in 20 years."

Despite Tom's injury, he and "Lori" scored 36 in the dressage at Badminton, the same score they achieved in their ninth-place finish at Burghley last year, and the home-bred mare was on flying form on crosscountry day.