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Alan Davies guest edit: Transporting top horses around the globe *H&H Plus*

Martha Terry Martha Terry

    • A horse’s career may be crowned in a five-minute championship round, but the logistics of reaching that apex is a gargantuan task. Martha Terry talks to those working behind the scenes

    When we cheer on an Olympic champion jumping his final clear round, we see the glorious fruition of months and years of training, practice and nurtured talent. What we don’t see is the monumental amount of time, negotiation, effort and the unsung heroes involved in physically getting not just that horse, but every horse in that championships, safely to – and home from – the event.

    Just flying hundreds of horses across the world to compete in a global championship is marvellous in itself, but that short plane trip is a tiny crumb of the years spent preparing for that journey. In most cases, it’s far longer than the time the rider has spent training his champion.

    Martin Atock is managing director at Peden Bloodstock, the appointed equestrian transporter and logistics provider for the past nine Olympic Games.

    “Flying horses isn’t even 2% of our work,” says Martin. “The bulk of it is the preparation. We’ve been working on the health, transport, quarantine and logistics preparations for Tokyo for five years. We’ve been to Tokyo 13 times. The preparation for these championships is ginormous.

    Martha Terry
    Martha Terry

    H&H features editor
    Martha is an experienced journalist who is mad-keen on horses and dogs. Her reporting CV includes the Paris Olympics, European championships, Aachen World Equestrian Festival and World Cup finals. After growing up with assorted liver and white springer spaniels, she enjoyed 14 years with two rescue dogs. Now, her constant companion is Fidget, an extremely energetic and habitually muddy black and white springer. Martha has written on topics as diverse as a top horse’s clone to the best GPS trackers for dogs, as well as equestrian and rural matters for Country Life, The Field, The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph alongside Horse & Hound.
    Martha Terry