Zara on finding joy after heartache
After two miscarriages and the death of her beloved horse, Zara Tindall is finally finding happiness. Elizabeth Day reports
The first person I meet when I go to interview Zara Tindall, Olympic medallist, the Queen’s granddaughter and 17th in line to the throne, is not in fact the woman in question but her four-year-old daughter, Mia. An utterly delightful host, Mia introduces herself and then her dogs in the kitchen of the family farmhouse near Stroud in Gloucestershire, before showing me where the loo is and telling me all about her desire for a pet hamster. “Oh nooo,” Tindall says when I relay this. “Just this morning she was like, ‘I really want a pet’, and Mike [Tindall, the former England rugby player and Zara’s husband of seven years] is like: ‘Er. You’ve got three dogs. And a pony.’”
Since June, Mia has also had a baby sister, Lena, whom Mike is currently bottle-feeding in the main house, while Tindall and I speak in a nearby converted barn, complete with comfortable sofas and an impressively well-stocked bar. It seems that, just like her mother, Mia knows her own mind. At the age of 37, Tindall has always been an independent spirit. Her mother, the Princess Royal, refused a royal title for her two children to allow them to carve out lives of their own – Tindall as an Olympic equestrian, who won a silver medal at London 2012.
“All I ever wanted to do was ride and compete and try to win stuff,” she says. Resolutely unstuffy, she’s one of a new generation of royals, along with her cousins Princes William and Harry, who have a downto-earth manner, dry sense of humour and a gift for connecting with people. Interestingly, they have all chosen to marry outside the confines of the Royal family.
“William and Harry are both great boys so, at the end of the day, everything they do, they do well,” she says. “They’re very good at public life and now they’ve found people [Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle] they can share that with.”
Earlier this year, a video clip went viral of Tindall sitting in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, looking somewhat underwhelmed at the energetic sermon given by the Most Reverend Michael Curry at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “I was uncomfortable!” Tindall points out; she was eight months pregnant at the time, carrying baby Lena, and the wooden pews were “this wide”, she says, holding up her slender iphone.
“My bum sort of slid over either side and Lena kicked the hell out of me for an hour… It just wasn’t comfy at all and it probably showed in my face. It was just the general amount of time everything was taking. I think my face was probably caught at the point when I thought: ‘Right, he’s going to finish now’, and then he went off on another little story, and it was like, ‘Really?’”
Both Tindall and her husband were “big Suits fans” before Markle, who starred in the series, married into the family. They also both watch the Netflix series The Crown.
“I hope they don’t get to us,” Tindall says of the drama, which is currently shooting its third season, set in the Sixties. “It would be mortifying to think how people perceive you.”
We digress briefly, thinking of actresses who could play her. Tindall is strikingly beautiful in the flesh, and I suggest Charlize Theron. “She’s taller than me, but I wouldn’t complain.” Generally, though, Tindall is much happier staying out of the limelight with her horses and her dogs.
“I’m very lucky because, unlike the rest of the family, I don’t have to do official stuff all the time,” she says. “I only turn up for family occasions. The rest of the time, I can go and compete and do other stuff while they work.”
It’s for this reason that, two months after the birth of her second child, Tindall has returned to eventing. In August, she took part in the Wellington Horse Trails and now has her sights set firmly on a place in Team GB for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
“I would love to try for another Olympics,” she says, remembering the “incredible” atmosphere of London 2012 when her own mother presented her with a medal. She has it in a box somewhere, but can’t remember where exactly.
Going back to elite sportsmanship eight weeks after giving birth is not your average return to work. “I feel better this time than the first time around,” says Tindall.
“Some people probably thought, ‘She’s going back too soon’, but it
‘I hope The Crown doesn’t get to us. It would be mortifying, how people see you’
actually gives me something to aim for and, actually, at this time, when they’re smaller, they sleep for a lot longer… I think I feel better as a mother if I’ve gone out and done my thing and done some training. I’m in a happier place and a better mother because of it.”
Motherhood did not come easily to Tindall. In December 2016, she had a late miscarriage around the fivemonth mark, which meant she had to go into labour. The couple had only just publicly announced they were expecting; having to reveal that they had lost their baby was, she says, “the worst thing”.
“You definitely get to a point where you can talk about it,” she says. “Right at the beginning, I wouldn’t have been able to… It happened. You have to go through the process of recovery more than anything.
“There’s no way of making it sound better than it was. You just rationalise it, I guess, you work out a way of dealing with it. It was horrible.”
She doesn’t go into detail about what went wrong, other than saying it was “a freak thing”. Mike was devastated, too.
“I think what men hate is feeling helpless,” Tindall says. “They cannot do anything except be there for you, but it’s their child as well, that you’ve made together.”
It was hard, but family and close friends rallied around them, and they have emerged a stronger couple for it. Then, last year, Tindall took the agonising decision to put down her beloved 24-year-old horse, Toytown, with whom she had won both European and World Championships. She spent five days and nights with “my greatest friend” before it happened, sometimes sleeping in his stable so that she could say goodbye.
“He had been in my life for longer than Mike, even,” she says, and starts to cry.
“I’m probably better talking about [the miscarriage] than about Toytown because I had a relationship with Toytown, even though he was a horse. I was really sad… I didn’t have a relationship with it [the baby] yet and maybe felt it was a bit easier…
“The other thing was that I was very lucky I already had Mia. I was still her mum and she needed me 100 per cent.”
Tindall had another miscarriage at five weeks before the birth of their second child. There was a moment where she thought, “Oh, maybe I’m not going to have another one. There are people who have one child and maybe that’s why. But we kept trying.” When they did eventually get pregnant with Lena, “because of what had happened, we were slightly more anxious”.
But, happily, she emerged a healthy 9lb 3oz – “She was massive! I liked the name Elena but I didn’t want her initials to be ‘ET’, so she’s Lena.”
We walk around to her stables where Tindall is clearly in her element. Before the photographer starts snapping, she brushes oil on her horse’s hooves to ensure he looks properly dapper in all the pictures. It’s a sweet gesture – but then, Zara Tindall has always been happier sharing the limelight, or staying out of it altogether.
‘I’m better at talking about my miscarriage than about putting my horse down’