Story by Chris Hector & Photos by Roz Neave and Kit Houghton
I don’t think I’ve ever conducted a double interview before, but then again it is a pretty unusual couple – Clayton and Lucinda Fredericks are currently running hot in the sport of eventing, and seriously looking like becoming the first Aussie married couple to make an Olympic team together…
That was the obvious opening question, is it an extra stress to be working together all the time, and competing in the same sport?
Lucinda: “I think it has always been the same. We haven’t known any different – it has always been like that. In our profession you have to end up with someone who does exactly what you do, or somebody who is completely separate. Otherwise if you get partners who are half and half, I think that is worse. But we seem to have managed. Any sort of relationship, you have to work at it, but I think it gives us a lot of assets in lots of ways…”
Clayton: “I think you’d probably be surprised how little time we actually do spend together!”
Lucinda: “We practically have to book an appointment to talk sometimes.”
Clayton: “I’ll be going off to a competition somewhere, Cinda will be headed in the other direction. We do work our horses at a little bit different times… we do help each other with eyes on the ground, but as far as an every day working day, I’ll be on a horse, she’ll be on a horse…”
Lucinda: “Our lifestyle is reasonably different to the other couples – like Andrew and Bettina Hoy, they don’t have to run a yard with 35 horses, and seven working pupils. We don’t just have ourselves to think about. Most of the competitions we go to, we have pupils there, and one of us has to go help them warmup, make sure they have walked the course properly, they are on time. Half the time they are borrowing stuff of ours, so then we haven’t got what we need… I tend to do all the running of the yard, Clayton does the outside business – the saddles, talking to clients abroad, he would tend to do all of that, and I do all the everyday mundane work. Which suits us fine. Clayton always gets up much earlier in the morning than me, and starts working, because his brain works in the morning and mine works at night time. It’s quite good really.”
Clayton, Lucinda, and Ellie
Lucinda, you grew up in that highly professional British Eventing scene, where it is practically a nine to five, five days a week job. But for you Clayton, it’s different in Australia where you tend to go to an event every couple of weeks, and in between times break in horses, or work in the local saddlery or feed store, was it a cultural shock moving from laid back Australia to full on Britain?
Clayton: “You’ve got to also remember that for three or four years before I went to the UK, I had the riding schools in Melbourne and in Perth. I would get up, go ride my horses, get all my eventers out of the way in the morning, and then it would switch to the Riding Schools at about two in the afternoon, and I’d start doing private lessons, then group lessons, and I’d go to about nine in the evening. So I was in a pretty good routine of sharing the day and doing horses full time. In fact for me, it was a bit of a break the first couple of years I went to England because I didn’t have so many horses. Gradually over the years it has built up and now we are riding flat out. I tend to ride a lot more of the young horses…”
Lucinda: “You do most of the competing on those and I would do more of the preparation at home with the working pupils. Our good riders at home not only get trained on their horses but ride a lot of ours because when we go away to an event, like Aachen we went away with one horse each, and we left a lot of horses at home. Our kids have had a lot of training to learn to ride our horses so that when we come back, they are on form for us to get back on and compete.”
It worked all right; you both went well at Badminton?
Lucinda: “I was lucky I had Headley Britannia with me in the training camp, whereas Clayton didn’t have his Burghley horses, but I don’t think it would have made a huge difference. Both his dressage tests were very good – our pupils just do the flat work and the fitness work, they don’t do the jumping at all on our horses.”
Lucinda Fredericks on Headley Brittania
Clayton came to eventing after a spectacular career as a Show Rider in Australia – what was your background Lucinda?
“I just loved horses or ponies, whatever, right from the start. We didn’t have any money, my dad was a major in the army, we moved every two years. I was off to boarding school at eight, which I loved. I wasn’t interested in school at all, but I enjoyed sport and I was the captain of all the sports things, whether it was athletics or gymnastics or whatever. Then I got a pony at age nine that used to bolt. My mother and I set up one of the big riding schools in Germany and I used to get on all these naughty ponies and get bolted with, bucked off, dragged on the floor, and it never put me off. It used to put my mother off, but I just got back on again. Nothing ever frightened me and I was lucky enough as a nine and ten year old to go and sit on some of the top international showjumpers that belonged to Ulrich Meyer zu Bexten, he was an international showjumper with Paul Schockemöhle at that time. I used to get put on these 17 hand German horses, going down jumping lines, aged nine and ten, just fearless. It was never in my mind to be frightened – quite odd really.”
“I had one pony that happened to be a really good jumping pony in Germany, outgrew her very quickly, then came back to England when I was 12, and we bought a German Trakehner mare, Miss Emmalou – she ended up being my junior and young rider horse. Never got on a team due either it going lame, tying up, always something stupid… I had her for 24 years. She was my best friend as I grew up. By the time I was 14 I was still at school but starting to do some planning and I just wanted to make a career out of horses. I didn’t know quite how I was going to do it. My parents just lived in an army quarter, no money – my Dad said, you can live at home, pay the phone bills, but the rest you’ve got to do on your own.”
“At the time we were paying about five pound a month for a stable, so I started getting in a couple of liveries, so from the age of 15 I was trying to run it as a little, little business and it just roller-balled from there. I went and worked for six months as a groom cum rider, saved a bit of money, rented a yard at the age of eighteen, and that was it. I was charging people all of £45 a week, which was a pittance really, it didn’t make anything but it covered things.”
Always eventing?
“Always eventing, never anything else. Never did pony club. Nothing was ever fast enough for me – high enough or fast enough. I just started to work hard, and it was day in and day out. I missed out on a lot of social life as a teenager of course. But that was my choice. I had friends, and the eventing scene is always social, wherever you are, in whatever country you are in, it is always social. Albeit, you are basically with the same people, same type of people – but I think they are pretty good people… not too much riff raff!”
“Certainly now that I have achieved one of my main goals in life – winning Burghley – the amount of people that either rang, wrote, texted, emailed, or sent cards, whatever… after Burghley, people going 20/25 years back contacted me and said I’ve followed your career all the way through, you won’t remember me, but I remember you… it’s been amazing how many people do actually follow you, and you are just doing your best, chugging along trying to do a good job. Finally when all your work pays you back and you fulfil one of the dreams of your life, I think people appreciate what you have done and how hard you have worked.”
Clayton when you went to the UK, did you have to alter much of your thinking about training, fittening work, preparing…
“I think I had a lot to learn, I’ve still got a lot to learn. I think you have to be adaptable to get the best performance you have to be open minded… I tried to just fit in and go with the flow and learn as much as I could when I moved over there, but yes, it was different. That’s why I went basically – to learn.”
Who influenced you?
“Just watching and talking. I always tried to ask questions of all the riders. It’s just my inquisitive nature to keep asking the questions. One thing that changed a lot, I was coming back to Australia for three months of the year and I went through a spell where I was having a lot of soundness problems with the horses. I had a chat with Mark Todd, and he said ‘when are you getting them into work?’ – and I said, I generally go home November, December and I’m back in January. He said that he had a similar sort of run, and he suggested that I start the horses in December – it gives them so much more time to get fit and you can do it a lot more gradually. Then by the time you get to the start of the season in March, the horses are much better prepared, and if you lose a bit of time from an injury or something, you are not panicking at the start of the season. That was a big change.”
“Also he said, don’t let them have too much of a break because it is too hard to get them back fit again. That helped a lot. Basically we don’t give our horses much break at all now.”
Lucinda: “So much has changed. It always used to be, you did Burghley and tossed them out in the paddock for three months to ‘be a horse’. But you didn’t have walkers then. Our horses are basically walked the whole time, whether they are on holiday or not. Why throw away all that muscle that you have built up? Think of how dreadful we feel by the time we have spent a month in Australia, getting soft and fat and horrible, and we feel dreadful, and it is hard work getting back in shape.”
Clayton: “And the older you get, the harder it is…”
Jumping for silver – Clayton and Ben Along Time at Aachen…
Do you go for specialist advice? For dressage? For showjumping?
Clayton: “Showjumping not so much. I haven’t really had that much help with the showjumping and it probably shows… The biggest thing is that I have had a lot of help with my dressage from Jane Bredin, who is just in the next village to us. That is handy. Lucinda has also had quite a lot of help with her pure dressage from Jane. Jane is probably not the most natural rider and she has had to learn everything. She has had so much training from all the top trainers, and she has so many exercises. If you have a problem with something, she’ll come up with an exercise to ride it through and sort it out. She has been really helpful.”
You two must obviously be focussing on the Olympic Games at Hong Kong at this point – you are both in there with a big chance of selection – so what does your program look like over the next two years? Are you going to wrap your ponies in cotton wool?
Lucinda: “Nothing will change as far as I am concerned. I’m just going to keep on going as I am. I’m very short of top horses. I sold two of my advanced horses this year. So really I’ve only got the little mare which is great, she is great fun… but no, I’m not one to be saving them. They are horses. Headley Brittania is one that likes to be out competing. She is not one to just do daily dressage, she likes her jumping, but she just loves her cross-country. I think the more experience you can get on them the better.”
“Clayton is pretty lucky, he has ridden Ben (Ben Along Time) right from the start and he has done a lot of events on that horse. What I would like to do is to have a chance of riding the same horse at the same four star more than once. I’ve never ever had that pleasure. You look at Andrew Hoy and Moonfleet – he went to Burghley this year, and he had already won Burghley with that horse. He had ridden around Badminton, so he knows that horse and he has done so much with that horse at that top level. He must know him backwards. It’s the same when he speaks about Mr Pracatan, he just knows him so well, and that must be a great feeling. I know Brit but not at that level… I’m certainly going to run her at four star next year, whether it’s at Badminton, Kentucky or Burghley – I don’t know, I’ll just do what I feel like doing. She’ll tell me what she wants to do.”
Clayton, after Aachen do you feel that you have probably established some credibility that you can plan your horse’s preparation for a major event?
“I don’t know about that – I think I want to take Ben Along Time to Lexington. Obviously that depends on the owner, and getting there… I’ve got some lovely young horses – Nullarbor, and a horse that was just fifth at Pau – The Frog. Things have changed quite a bit in England, opportunities for foreign riders has dwindled. You’ve got to have your own horses, because the good horses are not going to the foreign riders. The Brits are putting a real push on the owners if they’ve got a good horse, to give it to a British rider… so getting rides in England is tough for us. I think we’d like to get more Aussies behind us. Maybe start to develop the trade in horses between Australia and the UK. It’s like anything, we’ve got some great horses at the top level and now we’ve got to think about what is coming after that…”
The ultimate would be to ride on the team at Hong Kong?
Clayton: “Of course, that was the goal at Aachen, we’ve got to try and make it the Games now. Hong Kong is a unique opportunity, it would be a real fairy tale for me because the owners, Edwin and Peta McAuley, that own Nullarbor and Ben Along Time they live in Hong Kong. I met them there when I was training kids. They’ve supported me for eight years now – the Olympic cross country will be held at the Beas River Country Club – which is their club, they ride there at Beas River. To see their own horse – that we’ve produced – get into the Olympics and go around the track there, that would be a fairy tale for them. They have been such fantastic owners – I hope all of our dreams come true…”
This article originally appeared in THM January 2007.