The Field interview: Harry Meade

The eventing world number one talks to Madeleine Silver about his early experiences, career highs and lows and his pursuit of perfection

Before I leave the Cotswold home of the eventer Harry Meade, he dashes up the stairs, three at a time, and returns clutching a vintage Pony Club manual. Inside are black-and-white photos of his late father, three-time Olympic gold medallist Richard Meade, illustrating how an eventer should correctly dress: the tack, the stock, the boots…

Now in his early forties, the five-star eventer has always been a self-confessed stickler for detail; Harry Meade’s head groom Jess Errington is meticulous in her horse care under his guidance. And it shouldn’t be scoffed at. This summer he topped the FEI Eventing World Athlete Rankings with two horses in the top four at Kentucky and two in the top six at Badminton, as well as third, fourth and twelfth at Burghley last year (he was third in 2023). It’s deserved recognition for someone who’s the sort of head boy of eventing: universally liked and unfailingly polite. It’s a tale of old-school horsemanship triumphing over any kind of fads or shortcuts.

Chronology of ponies

Growing up just fields away from Badminton, as a boy he dreamed of winning that holy grail of the sport that happened to be his local. “Like lots of children I can measure my childhood in the chronology of ponies but they were definitely not smart or flashy,” he says, recounting days hunting with his parents and siblings with the Beaufort. “We’d go to the Meet and come back in the dark. Long days in the saddle were the best education for learning to look after your horse – riding in balance and conserving energy.”

Meade was born in 1983 just two years before his father retired after the type of stellar career that transcended mainstream sport and made him a household name. “It was a golden era for eventing, at a time when Britain didn’t have success across the board in other sports,” he says about that level of his father’s fame. “He was certainly an inspiration to me, and I see it a bit with my own son, who aged two or three was besotted with ponies, refusing to take his crash hat off even when he went to bed, and was insistent that riding was what ‘real boys do’.”

Meade’s parents were reluctant for him to follow them into the sport, insistent he get a degree first (he did, from Bristol) and adamant they wouldn’t own horses for him. “My father had so much success, he didn’t need to live his ambition through me: they were both familiar with the work, sacrifice and disappointments that come with competing.”

Trickier horses

Success with catch rides and trickier horses was one of Richard Meade’s fortes but one with whom many parallels can be drawn with some of his son’s own early rides. He describes the thrill of solving “complex puzzles” in challenging horses.

The perfect case in point was Midnight Dazzler, a notoriously quirky horse who became Meade’s first fivestar ride. He was a very hot-headed horse, and somewhat of an enigma, but Meade never doubted his latent talent. Finding the key to tap into that ability was a eureka moment, and Midnight Dazzler would take him to his first Burghley in 2005, and from there they never looked back. He and Midnight Dazzler formed a partnership that saw them become stalwarts of five-star eventing.

Fall

But there have been twists in Meade’s road to the top over the subsequent two decades that would be hard to script. In 2013 he suffered a rotational fall at Wellington Horse Trials, shattering both his elbows, which called for his wife Rosie to take unpaid leave as a schoolteacher to nurse him, while juggling looking after their then 18-month-old daughter – all at the same time as being pregnant with their son. “The elbows were shattered to powder, so the issue wasn’t whether I walk away from the sport, it was about whether these two limbs would physically let me continue,” he says, recalling his father sitting by his bedside throughout his recovery “often in silence, but just being together.

“We were dealing with the unknown but eventually I did start riding again. At that first event in the March after the accident I remember thinking ‘This is what I’m meant to be doing’. That whole season I was able just to enjoy every moment of it , everything was a bonus.” And the result was fairy tale-esque, finishing third on Wild Lone at Badminton, and the pair getting the tap for the 2014 World Championships in France. But it was after another immaculate cross-country round in Haras du Pin, representing his country, that he lost Wild Lone: the cruellest of endings to his comeback.

Chasing perfection

Meade admits this sport is like a drug, one that anyone who events can relate to. “I think most riders fall off a cliff at the end of the season because you’re so used to working towards a target and when that temporarily evaporates, you’re left with a horrible emptiness. For some people it’s about winning but for me it’s about chasing perfection: getting to that pinnacle of the challenge, that sense of fulfilment when a well-prepared horse finds it easy,” he says.

“It’s not about being recognised. If you could set up the most difficult course in history and ride around it with no one watching, I’d still find that the greatest pleasure.”

Read our interview with Clare Balding here.