The Christmas present I won’t forget
A HAND-KNITTED cross-country jumper given to a 12-year-old Andrew Balding wasn’t as popular as the Flat trainer’s grandmother had hoped (“It wasn’t like what any of his friends had and didn’t last quite as long as she would have liked...” says Andrew’s wife Anna Lisa). And for dressage Olympian Richard Davison, it is a knitted loo roll cover of him in his tail coat, sitting astride a top hat, given by a pupil’s mother, that tops the chart as his most “memorable” horsey Christmas present. “These days most people tend to give me bottles...” he says with an air of relief.
But, for others, the thought of carefully tied parcels from Christmases past can transport them back to those cherished first ponies, that early taste of success in the spotlight – or just the flurry of excitement that their sport stirred in them as children.
