ANDREW HOY, the triple Olympic team gold medalwinner from Australia, is in line to win the richest prize in eventing — the $250,000 (about £133,000) Rolex Grand Slam — if he can add this week’s Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials title to his successes in Kentucky and at Badminton this year. Only one rider, Pippa Funnell in 2003, has succeeded since the offer — to win three four-star events consecutively — began in 1999.
In a boost for Hoy’s chances, the Australian Equestrian Federation allowed him to ride his reserve horse, Master Monarch, winner of Kentucky, at the World Championships two weeks ago — the team won the bronze medal — and keep his top horse, Moonfleet, on which he won Burghley two years ago and Badminton in May, for this week.
“Andrew’s been a great team player for us, so we wanted to do everything we could to help him,” Wayne Roycroft, the Australia team manager, said.
Hoy, 47, will need all the help he can get. He faces an 83-strong field, which, though without Zara Phillips, the new world champion who will parade on Sunday on Toytown, includes last year’s winner, William Fox-Pitt, with Ballincoola and Idalgo, Mary King, a team silver medalwinner in the World Championships Aachen, Germany, with Apache Sauce and Cashel Bay, Andrew Nicholson, of New Zealand, who was third last year, with Henry Tankerville and Jeanette Brakewell on Over To You, her 2002 world silver medal-winner.
Of these, Fox-Pitt is the most threatening. A triple winner of Burghley, he has two contrasting but in-form horses. Ballincoola, 12, is competing in his sixth four-star event while Idalgo, a classy ten-year-old who led after the cross country at Punchestown in May but did not complete the course because of injury, is competing in his first.
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“He’s very talented and a larger-than-life character, but he’s unproven at this level,” Fox-Pitt, who followed his team silver medal in Aachen on Tamarillo with third place on Parkmore Ed at Blenheim on Sunday, said yesterday.
Although Hoy has given himself two bites at the cherry by entering Mr Pracatan, on which he was sixth last year, Sue Magnier’s Moonfleet, with his superior dressage and fast, reliable jumping, is the horse the other riders have to beat.
His draw — he goes last of the 83 starters — will add to the pressure on Hoy, but it will also give him plenty of time on Saturday to see how Mark Phillips’s cross-country course, regarded as being tougher than Badminton, is riding.