Dido Harding may no longer be at the reins of a FTSE company but the former chief executive of Talktalk stormed to victory yesterday in the Magnolia Cup at the Qatar Goodwood Festival.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe, who quit the telecom group in May after seven years, had finished runner up in the charity horse race for the previous two years.
She has ridden in all but one of the seven races, which is limited to unlicensed female riders and contested over five and a half furlongs. It wasn’t until yesterday, however, that she won the race with her horse Ducks and Dumplings.
The five length victory must have been a sweet one as she admitted afterwards she had only been on a horse two or three times in the past six weeks. Her daughters Emma and Becca, 10 and 11, were there to watch.
The former amateur jockey told Horse and Hounds after the race: “There is nothing like the adrenaline of riding them yourself . . . I’ve been saying I had to keep doing it until I won, but retiring now would be very hard — we’ll have to see.”
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She remains a member of the House of Lords, a non-executive director at the Bank of England and a trustee of her digital inclusion charity, Doteveryone.