The genius of Sir Mark Todd
One of the greatest horsemen of the modern era has just retired. He tells Julie Harding why he called time on his stellar eventing career and how racehorses are now set to fill his days
AN IMMACULATE TRACK leads to Badgerstown, once the headquarters of National Hunt trainer Stan Mellor, who saddled the famous Pollardstown to win the 1979 Triumph Hurdle, plus Royal Mail and Lean Ar Agha to a third place apiece in two Grand Nationals. Badgerstown has pedigree and on a large expanse of neatly mown grass in front of the stables is a diminutive statue of a jockey sporting a blue silk with four red diamonds. Like an opening scene to ITV’s Through the Keyhole, the diminutive man-boy with the staring eyes provides a clue as to which celebrity lives here now, decades after Stan Mellor and his great horses vacated the place. He’s a New Zealander, a former racehorse trainer in his native country — he trained Bramble Rose to win the 2003 New Zealand Oaks — but he’s also a legendary event rider in both hemispheres who won back-to-back individual Olympic gold medals, four Badminton and five Burghley titles, plus a raft of others. And the icing on his proverbial cake was that in 2013 he was knighted for services to equestrian sport.
Sir Mark Todd, who has just called time on this sparkling eventing career, is here in Badgerstown’s spacious magnolia-walled office in which large windows provide views beyond the jockey statue to horse-filled paddocks. But Toddy isn’t egotistically reeling off a long list of triumphs. Instead, the modest sexagenarian is struggling to remember past victories and particularly dates and so he has resorted to asking Google on his smartphone. One that needs no internet prompt, though, is his first championships, and only the second three-day event he ever contested. The 1978 Lexington Worlds was almost apocalyptical, but run before social media spread bad news and animal welfare groups held little or no sway. Mark was just 22 years old and a naïve rookie who assumed that impossible fences and horse falls were part and parcel of the eventing game. “I’ve never seen so much carnage, plus we were competing in 90°F heat and 100% humidity,” he recalls. “Now it would ring alarm bells from the beginning and wouldn’t be allowed. My horse, Top Hunter, broke down on the steeplechase [then phase B] and pulled himself up halfway round the cross-country.” By contrast, Badminton two years later was far more genteel, and armed with different horsepower — Southern Comfort III — the 6ft 2in Kiwi with (then) an abundance of wavy brown hair found himself collecting the winner’s trophy as spectators in the stands turned to each other and asked, “Mark who?”
In the two decades that followed, every horse enthusiast in the world learned the name Mark Todd, in part thanks to the 15.3hh Charisma, Mark’s “horse of a lifetime”, whose brilliance at the 1984 Los Angeles and 1988 Seoul Olympic Games meant his lofty rider could boast (although, of course, he didn’t) of being Olympic Champion for eight years on the bounce. “LA was amazing,” says Mark. “It was my first Games, so everything was all so new. Of course, it was all helped by the fact that we won a gold medal.” As the years rolled on, the list of accolades grew ever longer, but Mark decided to retire. For the first time. In any other elite sport he would no doubt have already called time, but 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics, seemed like the right time for him. “I was 44 then and most people didn’t go on for longer than that,” he says. “By then I’d won everything and, a bit the same as now, I’d lost motivation and I thought that if I’m to have a different career I’ll have to do it now before I’m too old.
“I rode at Burghley, where I also had a clear-out sale out of the back of the lorry, which had already been sold! And then we were off. We dropped Lauren and James [his children] and our dogs off in New Zealand, and I flew on to Sydney to compete. Afterwards the horses flew back to the UK and I returned to New Zealand, I thought for good. I never dreamed that I’d event again.” Toddy returned to Britain in 2008 for “a dare” with a new horse — NZB Gandalf. “I thought I would go to the Beijing Olympics, sell the horse for a profit and go home. It was never more than that.” However, Mark was persuaded to stay and focus on London 2012, with, he imagined, NZB Land Vision, the horse with whom he’d won Badminton in 2011. But the plan was thwarted when the grey gelding injured a tendon and Mark turned up at Greenwich with NZB Campino, whose score still helped the New Zealand squad to net team bronze. But the years continued to relentlessly slide by. At his last two Olympic Games the great man, whose brown hair was by now flecked with a silver that matched many of his medals, was mistaken for an official. “The Olympics are for younger people,” he states. “With another Olympics coming up, I didn’t want to take someone else’s place.” He also started to become self-critical of his lauded riding prowess. “I felt that I wasn’t riding as well or seeing distances so well. A few years ago, I damaged my left eye chopping wood and tore the retina. Surgeons patched it up and put in a new lens. Some time ago, I saw an eye specialist and had another operation, which was a success. Seeing a distance used to just happen, but now I was having to think about it. I was having to focus more. It wasn’t as automatic or as natural. I was also down to five or six horses and not riding as much. Maybe it was that.”
Initially Mark planned to retire after next summer’s Tokyo Olympics. “I kept thinking, ‘only one more year’. And then I started to become involved with racing again and that meant I didn’t want to ride the event horses. So then I decided that I wasn’t going to the Olympics and would finish at the end of this year. As soon as I made that decision I would think, why am I going to this competition? What if it’s one too many? Over the years we’ve lost a few friends. And it’s not just about losing your life. What about a serious accident, like Andrew [Nicholson’s broken neck] or William [Fox-Pitt’s head injury]? “Also Carolyn [his wife] wasn’t enjoying seeing me ride any more. I’m not as young as I used to be. You get to my age and you think when is the right time to stop. I used to say to people, if I start looking like I don’t belong in the saddle, please tell me. While I was still reasonably competitive, I’d stopped taking as many risks. If I knew I had to go within the time, I would push myself to get it, whereas before I would always finish within the optimum. Maybe that was my competitive drive waning a bit. Most of
my contemporaries — Lucinda [Green], Ginny [Elliot], Clissy [Strachan], Scotty [Ian Stark] — gave up years ago. “Having said that, it didn’t bother me that I was an older event rider. I’ve been competing against kids of my contemporaries for a while. It’s kind of funny. In some ways,
mixing with younger people keeps you young and it gave me satisfaction that I could still beat people a quarter or a half of my age.” By the time Mark caught the ferry to Ireland in July to contest the Camphire International with Leonidas II, he had decided this would be his last event. “I didn’t want a big fuss, so I hardly told anyone,” he says. “There were lots of tears when everyone found out. Graeme [Thom, ESNZ high performance manager] made a speech while I was on the podium [the Kiwis won the Nations Cup contest] and I turned to [Irish eventer] Sam Watson and said, ‘It sounds like I’ve just died’!” Mark chuckles. “It was a hard decision. But when do you get out?” The catalyst for Mark’s decision had come to Badgerstown in the form of Sir Peter Vela’s talented five-year-old racehorse Eminent. “Sir Peter sent Eminent to me before he went to stud in New Zealand. I travelled to Australia with him for a Group 1 race. That set in motion my thought processes. I’ve always loved racing.”
As most of the event horses vacate the 40 stables here, an equal number of sleek Thoroughbreds bound for the track have taken over their loose boxes. Although there are no owners out there yet clamouring to give Mark £1 million to buy a potential superstar, the New Zealander has big dreams for his bargain buys. He certainly isn’t going to be happy with a winner at Chelmsford — he’s going after the bigger booty: Royal Ascot, the Epsom Derby, the Oaks (the UK version this time) and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe to name just a few. “We’re in the bracket of looking for good value for money horses,” he says. “If the operation isn’t successful in two or three years, we’ll have to look at it again.” So now he’s leaving the horse trials arena for good, will Mark spill the beans and reveal his thoughts on the state of the sport, and the altered Olympic format — only three riders, with all scores to count? “Most nations didn’t want to see an end to the drop score. I don’t like what they’re doing to the sport to be a part of the Olympics. Now they want more countries included, but they don’t want an accident, so they have to make the competition easier. In the long run, the same riders will still win, but it’s not the ultimate as it once was.” As for the national sport, it’s less fun, less sociable and in some ways less safe. “Course safety has backfired and because they’ve made fence profiles softer, riders have started to take more risks. It’s not the good ones I worry about, but those on the way through and people wanting to get to a level beyond their ability. There’s more that could be done in terms of rider education.” So many people will miss the incredible, dependable, seemingly ageless Mark Todd. He says: “I don’t think I’ll miss eventing at all, but I will miss my friends. When you’ve competed there is always this bond.”