Zara Tindall has spoken candidly about the no-nonsense upbringing she experienced under Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, disclosing that both parents made clear she would be entirely on her own if she chose to pursue a career in the saddle.
Appearing on the Talk Horse podcast this week, the King’s niece, 45, described how her mother and father laid down uncompromising terms when she expressed interest in competitive riding after leaving school.
“I think my dad and my mum were like, ‘But you have to do it properly. And this is how it’s going to work. And you’re not getting any help and you need to produce results’,” she said.
Mrs Tindall, who went on to claim a world championship title and Olympic silver for Great Britain, acknowledged that the experience shaped how she now raises her own three children, though she is consciously attempting a gentler touch.
Zara Tindall has spoken candidly about the no-nonsense upbringing she experienced under Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, disclosing that both parents made clear she would be entirely on her own if she chose to pursue a career in the saddle
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GETTY
The daughter of Princess Anne, 76, and Mark Phillips, 78, who were married for 19 years before divorcing in 1992, Mrs Tindall spent her formative years at Gatcombe Park, the Princess Royal’s Gloucestershire estate, where horses were a constant presence.
She and her elder brother Peter, 48, were brought up without royal titles, something Mrs Tindall said allowed her to blend in seamlessly at Pony Club. “We were just part of the group, just having fun,” she recalled.
Yet the siblings were never shielded from the unglamorous realities of stable life.
“We had to do everything with them. We had to clean our tack. We had to muck them out,” she said, adding that her parents’ head girl at the time “was like a Rottweiler. And if we didn’t do it, we were in serious trouble.”
Appearing on the Talk Horse podcast this week, the King’s niece, 45, described how her mother and father laid down uncompromising terms when she expressed interest in competitive riding after leaving school
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YOUTUBE/TALK HORSE
Mrs Tindall described the woman as “amazing”, crediting her with instilling the discipline that horse care demands.
Of all the influences on her riding career, Mrs Tindall identified her father, a team eventing gold medallist at the 1972 Munich Olympics, as by far the more demanding parent.
Princess Anne, she suggested, took a hands-off approach to coaching. “Mum’s very relaxed,” Mrs Tindall said. “She’s like, ‘Just, you know, just do what you do’. Whereas my father’s like, ‘More of this, more of that’.”
Captain Phillips rarely offered the kind of encouragement his daughter craved, she revealed.
“My father was quite critical… Very rarely you would get a, ‘Yeah, that was good’, out of him,” she said. “So it was always striving to try and get that comment. He was a tough coach.”
That relentless pursuit of a word of praise from her father became a driving force throughout Mrs Tindall’s competitive years, pushing her to continually raise her own standards.
The gruelling apprenticeship under Captain Phillips ultimately bore remarkable fruit. Riding her celebrated horse Toytown, Mrs Tindall captured individual gold at the European Championships in 2005 before claiming the sport’s biggest prize, the individual title at the 2006 World Equestrian Games in Aachen.
That same year, she was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year, cementing her status as one of Britain’s foremost sporting figures.
Her crowning Olympic moment arrived at London 2012, where she helped the British eventing squad secure a silver medal. In a memorable family tableau, it was Princess Anne who placed the medal around her daughter’s neck during the presentation ceremony.
The trajectory from a teenager who admitted she “didn’t do very much work” at school and simply wanted to “have a crack” at riding competitively to world champion and Olympic medallist stood as powerful vindication of her parents’ exacting philosophy.
Now a mother of three with husband Mike Tindall, daughters Mia, 12, and Lena, eight, and son Lucas, five, she is conscious of tempering the approach she inherited from Phillips.
“He was a tough coach,” she said, “but I’m trying not to be quite that bad with my own kids.”
Both Mia and Lena have already taken up riding, and Mrs Tindall recently brought them jumping together with Peter’s daughters Savannah and Isla Phillips. The outing, however, offered a reminder that parental guidance is not always welcome.
“I said to Mia something, she just rolled her eyes. I literally said the same thing to the other guys; they didn’t roll their eyes at me,” Mrs Tindall said with amusement.
She conceded the dynamic was probably familiar territory. “I think I was probably like that with my mother and father too.”