H&H interview
Britain’s leading female showjumper talks to Catherine Austen about her Olympic dream, a quest to keep the best horses in Britain and family sacrifices
Leading female showjumper Laura Renwick on keeping horses and making sacrifices
TOKYO is my dream,” says Laura Renwick. “The Olympics has to be the pinnacle of anyone’s aims.”
It is something of a curiosity that Britain’s leading female showjumper has not yet jumped on a championship team.
Laura skirts carefully round the subject — she and her husband John have not always seen eye to eye with the powers that be in Team GBR and have preferred to plough their own furrow — but there is no doubt that her ambitions include representing her country sooner rather than later.
“The World Equestrian Games might come slightly too early for Top Dollar VI
[her Olympia Puissance winner, now nine, who has all the scope and power for the very highest level], and I suspect that Di [Lampard, Britain’s showjumping performance manager]
‘At the end of the day, my horses are all for sale. With the exception of Scott Brash and Ben Maher, who has owners
with unlimited funds?’
already has her team in mind for this year. But in 2020 he should be in his prime and that is what I am aiming for. I don’t think you could physically build a course he couldn’t jump so I’d like to think that if I can get everything right, he should have a real shout. ”
WE are talking at possibly the world’s most absurdly glitzy show — Glock’s in Austria — where Laura has just won a valuable young horse class on Sharon Whiteway’s seven-year-old mare Novita Jovial Z. Top Dollar has performed well — his huge jump and endless stride isn’t ideally suited to indoor jumping, and petite Laura admits that she can feel thrown about “like a rag doll”.
“It’s hard for him indoors because the fences come up so fast, but he wants to stay as careful as he can. As he gets stronger, he will be able to contain his power a bit more — he was a September foal, so although he is officially nine, in reality he is eight months off that. I think he will be a top, top horse.”
With just three horses here at Glock’s, it is something of the calm before the storm ahead of a trip to Vilamoura for nearly three months with 12 horses.
By the time of writing, she has won eight classes at the Portuguese venue on five different horses.
“I really do have some lovely young horses, and some of them are home-breds,” she says. “We’ve always bought young horses and brought them on ourselves, but now that we have some good mares it seemed silly not to breed from them.”
Keeping these talented young horses, though, is the perennial problem. “At the end of the day, they are all for sale. It’s such a vicious circle, though — you need a string of horses to get the points and keep your rankings up so you can jump at the top shows. But with the exception of Scott Brash and Ben Maher, who has owners with unlimited funds?
“It would help so much if there was some kind of system in place whereby if you have a really good eight-year-old, you could get funding [from Team GBR] to run the horse in the way that would be most beneficial to its development into a top horse. That way we could keep good horses in Britain.”
THE life of a showjumper on the international circuit is a peripatetic one, and one wonders how the Renwicks manage any sort of family life. John and Laura’s son Jack is now 16, and much more into football than showjumping.
“When Jack was younger, he came with us a lot and it was much easier, but now, with school and the fact that he plays football for Essex, he doesn’t come as much. But we are very lucky that our families all live quite close to one another — any time he spends away from us is spent with family,” she says.
There are sacrifices.
“I do miss things like sports days and parents’ evenings, but we always make sure there is a family member there with him.
And I always go home between shows, rather than going straight on to the next one. I love being at home and when I am there, I don’t want to go out. We do have a nice balance, though.”
Laura came to professional showjumping late. Her family was a farming, horsey one and she did well in the sport when she was young — actually buying her first proper jumping pony, Cygnet, from her future husband — then focused on a career as an air hostess. But she was drawn back to the sport in her late 20s, first as an amateur.
“When I started riding competitively, I made sure I had the right aims and put the hard work in,” she says. “It just sort of snowballed. When you start, you never think you’re going to be in the top 50 riders in the world and then when you are, you wonder how it happened. Now it’s about staying there.”
British showjumping badly needs an image reboot. Its serious stars are all male and, while there is no doubting their brilliant horsemanship, they can appear quite remote. Here is an approachable woman with appeal beyond the insular equestrian world. She is building a string of quality horses and clearly possesses that essential quality that all top sports people must have — the ability to win. Let’s hope she receives the backing and support to push her those last few inches to the top.