FAMILY TIES
As part of H&H’s 140th anniversary this year, we are celebrating Britain’s great horsey families with a series of interviews. In our second instalment, we speak to multi-medallist Gareth Hughes, his wife Rebecca and their daughter Ruby
Celebrating 1884 140 2024 years
WE struck off by discussing the differences in how they each got started in dressage...
REBECCA:
I started out at our local riding school when I was 10 years old in Belgium – where I lived at the time. We moved to the UK when I was 13 and that’s when I got my own pony and got involved doing all the usual Pony Club things.
I didn’t really have a horse that could jump, so I had to do all of the tack and turnout competitions at the local gymkhanas. But I’d always enjoyed schooling the horses and I entered a talent- spotting competition that they used to have years ago at Talland School of Equestrian. I ended up winning that – totally out of the blue – and that switched me onto dressage.
I spent a year as a working pupil with the late Sarah Whitmore, who had a lot of other young riders based with her – and that was it for me. But back then I didn’t realise it could be a career.
GARETH:
I also always had a pull to dressage but goodness knows where it came from. I grew up in a place called Jimboomba in Australia, which wasn’t exactly the epicentre of world dressage. We didn’t have the internet then, so I used to get magazines and I remember my grandparents coming over for Christmas and gifting me a subscription to British Dressage magazine, so I followed it as much as I could, then I started watching VHS training tapes from Europe.
But I grew up working with Arabian horses; I did in-hand showing, Western and English. The breed was huge in the 1980s and ’90s in Australia. It was so big that a lot of the performance riders in Australia were also involved in that world.
At the time, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to do horses or play saxophone for a living – but as it turned out I wasn’t very good at the saxophone, so horses it was.
My parents moved back to the UK when I was in my early 20s. Initially I stayed in Australia, but then I thought I’d give it a go over here for a couple of years, all the while planning to go back to Australia – that was 30 years ago now.
GARETH HUGHES
GARETH is a two-time team silver medallist at the dressage World Championships, and won team bronze at the European Championships in 2013, silver in 2021 and gold in 2023.
REBECCA HUGHES
