Zara Tindall has opened up about her ‘tough’ upbringing and why she’s doing things differently with her own children.
During an appearance on the Talk Horse podcast this week, the British equestrian opened up about her childhood in the Pony Club. She said she and her brother Peter were able to just be ‘normal’ members of the club.
“We were just part of the group, part of just having fun,” she told hosts Pippa Funnell and Tristan Phipps. “That’s great thing about sport, but especially eventing or equestrian sport, is that you’re all out there to do the same job and it doesn’t matter who you are, or who are you to the horse or anyone else, you’ve got to get out and get it done.
“I loved that about it.”
The 45-year-old said that the ‘muck-in’ attitude continued at home as the siblings were expected to put in the work of owning horses.
“We had to do everything with them… we had to clean our tack, we had to muck them out, ” she explained. “My Mum and Dad’s head girl at the time was like a Rottweiler, and if we didn’t do it, we were in serious trouble.”
“She was amazing though, completely put us in our place and taught us what we needed to do and the discipline of having horses,” she added.
Later in the podcast, the royal said she initially decided to pursue a career in the sport when she was just about to finish up at school.
“I had a great last couple of years at school and didn’t do much work, I played lots of sport and then I thought I just see whether I’m any good at it,” she explained.
“And my dad and my mum were like you have to do it properly, and you’re not getting any help, and you have to produce results.”
She was trained by her parents – Captain Mark Phillips and Princess Anne – who she said had “very different” training techniques.
“My mum’s very relaxed… whereas my father’s like ‘more of this, more of that’,” she said.
The mum-of-three then admitted she spent a lot of her younger years striving for her dad’s approval.
“My father… he’s quite critical… very rarely you would get a ‘yeah, that’s good’ out of him. So it was like always striving to get that comment,” she said, before sharing that she’s trying to be different with her own children.
“He was a tough coach… I try not to be that bad with my kids… you’ll have to ask them how it’s going.”
The former Olympian said she has been taking her daughters Mia, 12, and Lena, 8, jumping with their cousins, Savannah and Isla Phillips, but her eldest isn’t always keen on her advice.
“I said something to Mia, she just rolled her eyes. I literally said the same thing to the other guys; they didn’t roll their eyes at me,” she recounted: “I think I was probably like that with my mother and father too.”
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