‘My battle cancer with & weight gain'
Four-star eventer Matthew Wright’s fierce fight to live
There were times that I wanted to give up on horses and on life. I would have been happy to walk off and shoot myself with a 12-bore
MATTHEW WRIGHT’S LIFE seems to consist of two halves. There is Before Cancer and After Cancer. The Matthew from Before Cancer is the self-confessed bad lad; the one who was intolerant, unfeeling, sharp and shortfused. Coiled like a spring, it would only take an ill-timed word, an insignificant incident, a snide glance to unleash his inner devil. Then there is the Matthew After Cancer. The man who is sympathetic, empathetic, considerate and calm. The Matthew who would happily try to help someone who is suffering as he has suffered. “Having cancer has changed me. I’m a different person,” says the 35-year-old event rider who has completed six Badmintons and five Burghleys — two of the most demanding horse trials on the planet — and who represented Britain at the 2005 European Championships at Blenheim with his speedy, coloured horse, Park Pilot. “I’m a lot calmer and more understanding of other people’s problems. I really like myself now. I want to try and help people so that they don’t have to go through what my family and me have been through.” Matthew received the diagnosis that would send him into a tailspin in 2012. On discovering a testicular lump, he had driven himself to his GP’s surgery alone, and without uttering a word about his horror find to his then girlfriend, Victoria, or to his parents, Roger and Jane. A specialist confirmed what Matthew had suspected. “Hearing the word ‘cancer’, I felt gutted and drained, but I had to put on a show because my family didn’t know. The word brings such a mental stigma with it.” Matthew and his surgeon at Weston Park Hospital in Sheffield devised a treatment programme together, opting for radiation therapy and hormone injections over and above the more invasive and fatigue- and nausea-inducing chemotherapy. “The radiation wasn’t good, but I could carry on. That’s why the treatment took longer,” says Matthew, whose trips to the radiotherapy department only ended last year. “Physically I was down, and ill with a few things, and there were days when I wouldn’t want to go eventing but I had to. I was concerned that I had to keep the money coming in. Everything I have, I own — from the lorry to the house. I’m a proud man. I didn’t want the cancer to come along and take away everything. I didn’t want to live in a rented house.”
M atthew was always a workhorse — as well as a significant-sized chip off the old block. He can recall buying and then selling a horse when he was eight years old. Countless horses arrived at the family’s yard in Lound, Nottinghamshire, the currency in his father’s dealing business. They ranged from hairy cobs Your Horse meets...
to quality sport horses like Lenamore, the quirky grey who would go on to win Burghley Horse Trials in 2010. “I rode any and every horse,” says Matthew. “One year I evented 60 different ones, but we kept that many coming through the door to make money. It was very much like a factory.” Into this life of working by numbers came the cancer; the most debilitating part by far being the ensuing depression. While Matthew would be upbeat one day, the next an all-consuming negativity would envelop him like a shroud. “There were times I wanted to give up on horses and on life. I would have been happy to walk off and shoot myself with a 12-bore. It was Dad who stopped me. It put a strain on relationships. I’d be snapping and I drank heavily. It was my way of dealing with it, but the wrong way.” Victoria, who he married on 24 September last year, became his “verbal punch bag”. “She took everything off me and bore the brunt. No one else would have done what she’s done for me,” says Matthew, who is father to Isabella, six, William, three, and Niamh, one. Many weeks after his diagnosis, Matthew found the courage to tell his mother, but it would be years before the eventing world would discover what had been ailing him. “A lot of people would make jokes because I grew so fat. Even then I didn’t say anything. Now those people know and a lot of them feel bad,” he says.
Matthew finally revealed the intimate details of his cancer battle on social media last November. “All my life I’ve been a very private person, but now I want to raise awareness. People out there are depressed; jockeys are committing suicide. I want to tell people that depression and cancer are easier to cope with if you get help. “After I got the all-clear it seemed right to tell the world, plus I wanted to launch my career over again. I wanted people to know why I’d been in the background. It’s gone better than I imagined. I’ve encountered some very understanding people and I have some great, supportive owners.” It looks likely that 2018 will be the first season of the rest of Matthew’s competitive life. He has around 20 horses he’s aiming to pilot into the prize money this season — money he will be donating to the charities Mind and Orchid. “I’ve had 10 new horses come in over the winter,” says the man who has been assembling a string as rapidly as a collector amasses memorabilia. “This is the first season I’ve felt ready to kick on. When I got the all-clear I got the bug back.” Three horses vying for the top spot in his string not only look similar but also share several characteristics. Prince Mayo, Obos Colombus and Wanskjaers Carlsson are all bay geldings; each having once been in the stable of a well-known event rider (Aussie Paul Tapner, Kiwi Mark Todd and Swede Christoffer Forsberg respectively) and each boasting form that has waned slightly of late. “It’s nice to have horses of this kind of quality,” he says. “I get up in the morning looking forward to the day ahead. “When I start competing again [in March] I’m still going to be competitive and repay the faith people have put in me. But it will be a different me because it won’t be a ‘win at all costs’ and it will have a bit of grace about it.”