Jane Holderness-Roddam

The 1968 Badminton winner discusses the pros and cons of the changing sport of eventing with Luz Wollocombe, and analyses how her top horses would have fared in today's elite levels

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FOR many fans, Jane Holderness-Roddam might be a daunting figure, a heroine in the world of eventing with an equestrian CV that few can match. She has won team gold at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, been chairman of selectors, judge, steward, president of British Eventing, author of The Galloping Nurse and stunt double in the film National Velvet. But within minutes of talking to her, I realised I’d be hard pushed to find a warmer, more welcoming person. Still, you don’t win Badminton on a 14.3½hh, the legendary Our Nobby, through kindness alone, and her bones of steel are sometimes detectable in the form of strong opinions, though nearly always followed up by diplomatic counterarguments.

So what does eventing’s royalty think of the current state of the sport?

“Well, I mostly miss the proper longformat three-day events; the roads and tracks and steeplechase,” Jane says. “I think they ensured you gave the horse much more of a warm-up and got your horses really fit.”

She worries that the younger crop of event riders know too little about this side of things.

“The old generation are now getting to the stage where they are retiring in the next 10 years and the younger ones coming on will have never experienced the roads and tracks,” she says. “They won’t have had to train their horses like we did, and by doing that you experience the ups and downs of proper fitness. Looking at some of today’s horses, even at the four- or five-star events, they don’t look fit to me – they’re too fat. It isn’t good for a horse to go round these twists and turns when they are overweight.”