Dressage rider Lara Butler talks Olympics and motherhood
The elite dressage rider, in the mix for Tokyo selection, has found that motherhood concentrates the mind when it comes to top level competition. Julie Harding meets her
‘You do wonder if having a baby will change you, but no.
I’m still just as driven as I ever was. But I feel like I have a different focus’
TWO WORLDS COLLIDE in the vicinity of a Bugaboo Cameleon buggy. Lara Butler inhabits both worlds. In one she is a new member of dressage’s elite club of barrier-breaking 80%-plus score achievers, with designs on a ticket to the Tokyo Olympics and a long list of reserve team slots on her CV. This Lara has just put her leading light Rubin Al Asad (aka Rufus) through his paces in the outdoor school. And then there is Lara the new mother, all gooey smiles as she reaches into the depths of the buggy to pluck nine-month-old son Jack from its quilted and cocooned depths. Extracted and held aloft, and then clamped to his mother’s side, Jack returns the smile, exposing two tiny white teeth in an ocean of gums.
“It’s killing my back lifting Jack. I have to be careful that he doesn’t make me crooked for the horses,” says Lara.
Most winter days play out something like this for Lara (née Griffith), a former dressage national champion, and Jack. He spends the morning at nursery or with a childminder while she rides, and then he returns to the palatial Eastington House Stables where a statue of Giorgione S, the Oldenburg stallion ridden at the Barcelona Olympics by Carl Hester, stares out over the huge sand school, frozen in a movement of passage. It was from here that Laura Tomlinson (née Bechtolsheimer), friend and mentor to Lara and now also a mother of three, trained from childhood and launched her team gold and individual bronze medal-winning tilt at the London 2012 Olympics.
“I bring Jack on the yard in the afternoon and fit in work like grooming around his naps,” says the hard-working rider of her great juggle. “I’m lucky that he’s such an easy baby. Billy [her self-employed builder husband] and I are quite laid back, so maybe Jack’s got that from us. He eats well too, which obviously helps to keep him happy.” Just like numerous other roll-up-yoursleeves-and-get-stuck-in riders, Lara discovered that ‘needy’ equines provided the perfect training ground for motherhood. “Horses require a lot of looking after, plus you need patience just like you do with a child, and you have basic instincts if anything is wrong,” she says.
But if anyone in the rarefied world of top-level pure dressage harboured thoughts
that Lara couldn’t have her baby and eat her slice of the prize cake too, she emphatically dispelled those by returning to the competitive fray seemingly more determined and even better than before, despite a tricky birth.
“Jack was fine, but I developed a haematoma and needed extra stitches,” she reveals. “I also became anaemic and I was in hospital for four days. For five weeks I had no intention of getting back into a saddle, but then I started to have a change of heart and from thinking, ‘there’s no way I’m going to do this’, I sat on Rufus and walked around the school. Then I gave him a canter and that felt fine, and then I thought ‘I’m going to train him’. I didn’t look back after that.”
She’s not over-exaggerating. Success piled on top of success. Geesteren and Hartpury (top 10 placings). Hickstead (grand prix — win; grand prix freestyle to music — win). Olympia (short grand prix — fourth; grand prix freestyle to music — fifth, and that score of 81.54).
“When I finished the freestyle to music at Olympia,” recalls Lara, “it was the first time that I knew we had done a very good test. I was warming down in the warm-up area when Carl [Cuypers, her new trainer] said: ‘You’ve scored 81.’ I said: ‘What?’ I never expected to get that.
“Carl hugged me and I burst into tears. I hadn’t competed Rufus since Hickstead in July and, after that amount of time out, we’re usually a little rusty, plus it was a new grand prix. But, from the moment we got there, Rufus was settled and focused. Going into the arena he seemed to have a different mindset. Even though we have a good partnership, it was so together. It can be a bit hit and miss as to whether he listens to me, but he was on the button the whole show and on fire.” Although children were firmly on the agenda after Lara’s 2017 wedding to Billy Butler (“he actually wanted a child more than I did”), on occasions while pregnant the 31-year-old pondered whether her competitive spark would be extinguished by disturbed sleep, relentless nappy changing, puréeing vegetables and altered priorities. She schooled horses until she was eight months pregnant, but the subsequent hiatus gave her an increased number of spare moments to contemplate such a scenario. “You do wonder if having a baby will change you, but no. I’m still just as driven as I ever was. But I feel like I have a different focus now. I don’t know if it’s the break — horse people aren’t used to taking time out from riding — or maybe it’s because I now split my time between family and horses. When I’m riding, I know that my time training is limited so I really concentrate on it, probably even more than before,” reveals Lara, who, of course, now couldn’t contemplate life without pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, strawberry blonde-haired Jack.
“I can’t even remember what life was like before he came along,” she confesses. “We timed having him around my competing so that I could still do the summer season, which I just about managed. I don’t usually do the winter season that much anyway and I was lucky to have Sarah Rogers [another rider at Eastington] who kept the horses ticking over. I’ll certainly carry on after Tokyo. Horses are my career, so Billy has to enable me to do a certain amount to be successful because that’s the way I earn a living.”
Billy, his Essex-based parents Mark and Sara, and Lara’s mum Caroline, performance manager to the British dressage team, have all been “amazing” in commandeering Jack when Lara needs a little baby-free time.
“Jack and Billy came to competitions with me in the early days when I was still breast feeding, but for the last few I’ve left them at home,” says Lara. “That enables me to fully focus on the horses. At home, Billy does the night shifts, too, plus he does the washing and we take it in turns to cook. Whoever puts Jack to bed doesn’t have to cook that night.”
Come May, Lara will be hoping to see her name typed on the nominated list for the Olympics. And on Saturday 25 July — day one of the dressage action in Japan — she would probably like to imagine that she will be preparing to enter the arena on the 18-yearold Rufus, or maybe his younger 15-year-old stablemate, Kristjan, but she doesn’t dare. Whichever horse it could potentially be, what isn’t in doubt is that she would rather be dressed in breeches and be looking through a set of bay ears than sitting in the stands in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.
There are surely only so many times you can play fifth fiddle (to the likes of Charlotte Dujardin, Carl Hester and others) before you berate life for being unfair. But Lara, who watched from the wings at the Rio Olympics, the 2017 European Championships and the 2018 World Equestrian Games, has a different take on it.
“I’ve said to myself, if I’m reserve again I’ll see it as a massive achievement after having time out. To be honest, I’ve got used to it, although being reserve so many times sometimes feels like we’re being overlooked slightly as a top combination. I have felt disappointed in the process of selection of some of the horses, and massive disappointment when at times I’ve thought, ‘that isn’t right’, but it is what it is, and you have to pick yourself up and keep going. I believe some time will be my time. I will eventually make a team, whether that’s on Rufus, Kristjan or Ampy [Amiek C; her own and Anne Hutton’s talented but tricky 10-year-old gelding]. Or when I’m 60! That’s the beauty of our sport — you can keep going.”
None of Lara’s glittering dreams would even be a spark of brain activity were it not for legendary horse trainer Dr Wilfried Bechtolsheimer and his wife, Ursula, who own Eastington House Stables, as well as the majority of the horses within (Kristjan is even home-bred). Nine years of association leads Lara to constantly term them ‘The Bs’. “They have taken me in and nurtured me like one of their own, and the fact that they let me do what I do is huge and something for which I’ll be eternally grateful. It’s a unique position to be here. The support they’ve given me is huge and never-ending. Dr B trains me and so does Laura, even though she’s moved now. We’re Team B at a show. I even feel like one of the family. They were so happy when I told them I was pregnant, and they continue to support me now with Jack. Mrs B is always buying him presents.” By the time Lara arrived for an interview for a work rider job at Eastington House Stables — when she was given a super-sharp Rufus to pilot for the first time — she had already trained with some of the best in the business, including Dan Greenwood and Emile Faurie. But none of this would even have happened had she not grown too tall for her eventing ponies aged 13, and her new horse Sir Dunnaway’s back injury kept all four of his feet emphatically on terra firma. “Emile set me up well,” she continues, adding that it is Belgian grand prix rider
Carl Cuypers (who will soon be based permanently as a trainer at Eastington) who has really helped to apply the polish.
“He’s our eyes on the ground here and at Laura’s yard,” says Lara. “He’s made slight changes and it’s given us a massive boost. He’s the reason Rufus went so well at Olympia. In fact, Rufus is going so well that we’ve proved we shouldn’t be ruled out [of Olympic selection] just yet.”