BEN HOBDAY
On super cobs, NHS heroes & beating cancer
YOU DON’T HAVE to win to be a winner. Take event rider Ben Hobday. He didn’t lift the trophy at Badminton 2016, but he did become the king of hearts. It was the small stuffed pony that did it. As the part-clydesdale Mulrys
Error launched over each giant crosscountry fence, the tiny toy, stuffed into Ben’s back number-bib, dived forward, only to be flung backwards on landing in harmony with its human pilot. The floppy-limbed toy was Willberry Wonder Pony, the creation of Hannah Francis, and it was a symbol of her charity, as well as cancer, suffering, striving, supporting and, sometimes, surviving. Hannah, able to watch that Badminton, was already seriously ill with osteosarcoma, and she died three months later.
“I’ve never met anyone so brave in my life,” Ben told the BBC’S Clare Balding in a tremble-filled voice during an interview after his clear round.
By this point Ben was a cancer survivor. He had overcome the aggressive, fastgrowing, life-threatening Burkitt lymphoma (see box, p16) and joined the Badminton startlist in remission.
But if this stage of his cancer journey was characterised by crowds, cheering and elation, the beginning was muted and occurred in a barber’s shop.
“Looking in the mirror I noticed that I seemed a bit chubby around the jaw, especially on the right side. I’d also started getting hot and cold sweats and I had pain in the back of my neck. I’d fallen off a young horse, though, and I wondered if that was the cause,” says Ben over the phone during the third national lockdown.
With the lump ballooning, Ben visited three doctors and received three wildly differing diagnoses: glandular fever, a
“When something like cancer happens, the doctors and nurses are the magicians”
cyst, nothing amiss. But his wife Emma’s mother secured him an appointment with another medic who, understanding the severity, sent him to a head and neck specialist who performed a swift biopsy.
“I was told that I would be rung with the results on the Monday, but on the Sunday the phone went and I was told to return to the hospital immediately,” Ben explains.
In the Newcastle Freeman Hospital he heard a term he’d never encountered before — Burkitt lymphoma. It was the kind of term that makes the room suddenly spin and thoughts become scrambled. It was 29 June 2015, a date etched forever in Ben’s psyche. “Another two weeks without treatment and I wouldn’t be here.”
Six cycles of intense chemotherapy followed, leaving Ben with no immune system, no energy, no appetite and no hair. “The cancer consumes you and you feel hopeless,” says Ben, who has never forgotten a conversation between a doctor and a patient that occurred when he was new to the under-30s ward in the Newcastle Freeman.
“One night the curtains went around one of the beds. The doctor was discussing the patient’s symptoms — they were exactly like mine. The doctor told him that he didn’t have long to live; that there was nothing more they could do. And there was me thinking, ‘Am I next’? You have no control over it.”
Ben’s treatment ended on 29 September, precisely three months after it began, a time he mostly spent in hospital, barring a couple of stress-filled trips home.
“Every time I returned home I got an infection and so I would be rushed back to hospital.”
As an elite event rider, Ben was used to structured days filled with schooling and hacking his competitive horses, and phone calls and meetings with buyers interested in a horse for sale from his Shadow Sports Horses business. But late 2015 was very different.
“I worked at building up my immune system while going back and forth to the hospital regularly for checks. I’d signed up to do a Your Horse Live demo on 17 November. I cancelled all the others, but kept this one in the diary as something to aim for and I managed to go. I was very weak and it was tiring, but all the kind messages I received buoyed me.
“When something like cancer happens, the doctors and nurses are the magicians, but so many people I didn’t even know were kind to me. I’m so grateful that there are people like that in the world.”
The day after Your Horse Live Ben had another important appointment — with a doctor, who would tell him the results of recent tests.
“It was a nervous time for me. I knew that the next day could bring very good or very bad news. No one knows how their body is going to react to the treatment.” The news was “remission”.
“That word still raises questions. My mother had cancer when I was 18 and she was in remission for 10 years, but last year she got secondary breast cancer.” Ben’s voice falls away.
If cancer taught Ben life lessons, it was what to value — “friends and family” rather than material possessions — and to live every day to the fullest. Now his days are back to being busy and structured, and they are again spent schooling his eventers and speaking to prospective buyers.
Every one of the 34 horses being produced for top level eventing or showjumping at Ben’s plush Morpeth base
“Mulrys may look like he should be pulling a Budweiser trailer, but he had a fantastically athletic jump. He gave hope to people that you can succeed even without the right equipment”
has a for-sale tag attached. The only time a horse doesn’t leave the yard is if an owner steps in and purchases half, as with Ben’s next big hope, Shadow Man II.
“I took him to a young horse class and Jane Chambers was watching. She told me that she wanted to buy into him. I ummed and aahed. Obviously I can make more money if I sell a horse outright, but I phoned Sallie [Ryle, owner of Mulrys Error] to ask her advice. She said that she thought we’d make a great partnership and so Jane and I did the deal. It was one of my best decisions. She’s a real grafter and she really deserves a horse like him.”
Bred in Belgium, Shadow Man II proved talented from the get-go. The gelding was backed one day by Ben’s former head girl Rachel Moran, and the following day Ben had him walking, trotting and cantering on both reins in the school.
“He was always so rideable,” says Ben, who would go on to become British National Champion at Gatcombe with the elegant chestnut in 2019, the same year that the pair were longlisted for the European Championships. Now Ben has designs on five-star level.
“We have a plan in place that includes Badminton. But if you want to be competitive at the top you want to be there permanently and there needs to be a structure in place,” he says, with a nod to his buying and selling business as an ongoing source of quality horsepower.
“When I was young I would watch the top riders like Pippa Funnell and Andrew Nicholson, and although they aren’t easy to beat they are beatable when you have a horse with top ability. Shadow Man gave me a taste for this.”
W hen Ben was learning the trade he actually pitched up at Pippa and William Funnell’s Surrey yard for instruction.
“That’s where I learned some valuable lessons about producing young horses and that is the key to what I’m doing now. There are a lot of eventers who graft riding horses that are no good, trying to impress people that won’t stick by them and then they end up without a pot to piss in. I learned that if you produce your own you get a better horse out of it, which in turn brings you more horses.”
One horse Ben didn’t produce from scratch was Mulrys Error. The chunky gelding with feet the size of dinner plates was being piloted by Sallie Ryle, who was receiving lessons from Ben.
“The week before she was due to compete Mulrys at Tattersalls, Sallie asked me if I would ride him. After that we never looked back. He may look like he should be pulling a Budweiser trailer, but he always had a fantastically athletic jump. He was great for my career. He also gave hope to people that you can succeed even without the right equipment.”
Ben, something of a social media star with 100,000 followers on Instagram alone, has given hope, too, to other cancer sufferers, often when hope is in very short supply.
As he told Clare Balding in that twominute interview at Badminton 2016 as he choked back tears: “I’m very fortunate to be here. Last year was a bit uncertain at times… It’s been a real task to get here, and I’m so grateful to everyone at the NHS that helped me.”