Eleanore Kelly is a former eventer turned multimedia journalist and will be reporting on all the equestrian action in Paris over the next two weeks. Read on for her insight as the event approaches.
This week I will be heading to my first Olympics as an accredited journalist. To me it is an example of how if you really want something and graft away at it, it nearly always happens. Just maybe not in the way you might expect it to. My journey to get to an Olympics actually started 24 years ago with a rather different focus.
In the summer of 2000, I watched the British eventing team win silver at the Sydney Olympics on the BBC. My horse Carnalecka Clover (Pod) was only five at the time, but I remember thinking that he would be the perfect age to compete in Beijing in 2008 and if that meant I had to change nationality to ride for Mongolia, then so be it – I had an Olympic dream. Pod and I muddled our way up to four-star together, before I realised we would not be going to any Olympics. But that was not the point. The Sydney Olympics, with its spirit of aspiration, solidarity and determination, inspired that teenage Ellie Kelly in the same way that it has no doubt inspired Laura Collett, Ros Canter, Tom McEwen and Yasmin Ingham and all the thousands of elite eventers to push the limits of horse-human achievement. Somehow, I knew I had to be a part of it.
In 2010, I was offered a job assisting on a BBC documentary called World Olympic Dreams ahead of 2012. Hinrich Romeike, the German Dentist who had won double gold in the 2008 Beijing Olympics was one of the athletes we tracked in the run up to London 2012. It was one of those amazing tales of an amateur rider who had the most extraordinary relationship his one horse, Marius Vogt-Logistik. I remember feeling so proud of our sport as I explained the importance of that bond between horse and human, to my BBC colleagues. They were fascinated and so impressed by it all.
I was accredited for the test event for London 2012 but going as a punter to the real thing was good enough for me. We were lucky enough to get tickets for the eventing dressage and showjumping. Watching Team GB take Team Silver was something I will never forget.
Tokyo was the first Olympics I applied for as a journalist. As soon as I received accreditation in early 2019, I started planning my ‘trip of a lifetime’. I was due to cover it for global press agency Reuters and a few British newspapers, so I felt privileged that I was able to ‘sell’ our sport to a mainstream audience across the world. Then came a global pandemic and the dream was shattered – as it was for so many other eventers who had primed their horses for that exact month. When it finally came in 2021, and Covid was still ‘a thing’, I decided it really wasn’t worth the £6000 it was going to cost me in flights and accommodation, for an event which would involve interviewing athletes behind glass or via a TV link. I did however write it from home and with GB’s fabulous gold-medal performance, had several articles published in The Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, Reuters and OK magazine.
As I write this, we are less than a week off the Paris Olympics opening ceremony and I cannot quite believe I will be there, rooting for our amazing riders and telling their stories. I have spent the last few weeks writing preview stories, one on Ros for The Telegraph and another on non-travelling reserve Bubby Upton for YOU magazine, which is the widest read Sunday newspaper supplement. This is testament not to my skills as a journalist but more to their incredible tales of triumph against adversity. I am willing to bet that anyone who has evented knows exactly what it is like to dig deep in order to overcome adversity. I have been lucky enough to interview athletes from so many sports in my 15 years as a journalist, but hands down, none are as resilient nor as humble as eventers. Whether it is nature or nurture – I can assure you that every single one of you are as tough as they come, so don’t let anyone or anything convince you otherwise.
The Olympics is one of the few opportunities we get to tell some of these great stories which inspire people from all walks of life. So now it’s just down to you: Ros, Laura, Tom and Yaz, because we’re counting on you to bring us home some medals. To inspire the nation and the next generation of horse-mad (or soon-to-be) teenagers.
