Team GB’s Olympic silver medal-winning equestrian team tell Channel 4 News about the agonies of competing in the three-day eventing.
In an interview with Krishnan Guru Murthy, the team of Zara Phillips, William Fox-Pitt, Mary King, Nicola Wilson and Tina Cook still appeared shell-shocked by their medal.
Zara Phillips, who is competing in her first Olympics, said she was “massively honoured to be here anyway, but to come away with a medal is just great”.
She paid tribute to the rest of the team saying: “We had a great team effort, it was a long day and it felt like it was going on forever but to have a medal hanging round your neck is just unbelievable.”
Phillips received a rapturous reception from the home crowd at Greenwich Park, which also included the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry as members of her family turned out in force to support her.
She beamed and kissed the Princess Royal, who is herself an Olympian, on both cheeks after receiving her medal.
Asked whether it was important to beat her mother, Phillips quipped, “It was very important to beat my father!”
The last time a British eventing team won gold was when her father Mark Phillips, now US coach, competed in Munich in 1972. He also won a silver in 1988, but he was not then a member of the royal family.
In 1976, the Princess Royal came 24th in the individual eventing and the team came ninth.
William Fox-Pitt said the usual competition anxiety is much worse for a team event: “You’re nervous for yourself but you go through the agony for each of your team-mates. By the end of four days you are pretty wiped out.”
Fifty-one-year old six-time Olympian Mary King did not rule out competing in Rio in 2016. She said: “I’ve been very fortunate to have done six, I would love to be at Rio. At the moment I absolutely love the sport, it’s such an exciting sport.
“I’m hoping that the fact it was in Greenwich, that there are a lot more people have now learned about three-day eventing and we’re going to have many more followers because of it.”