INTERVIEW
‘I decided I wanted to teach riding at the age of 12’ riding at the age of 12’
Julie Harding meets the esteemed eventing instructor and finds out about her glittering career, book launch, getting a new training academy off the ground and living with stage 4 cancer
THANK GOODNESS CAROLINE Moore is an open air fanatic. She has, after all, spent the majority of her 35 years as an eventing trainer in the great outdoors, standing uncomplaining while keeping a watchful eye on an extraordinary cross section of rosette collector pupils as they fly over solid fences on myriad cross-country courses or coloured poles in arenas. The weather may register in the minus zone on a thermometer, or rain may be cascading down, but Caroline never cancels, and over the decades she has built up a formidable wardrobe of thermals and f leeces to cocoon her from the elements. These days she is the happy recipient of sponsorship (in clothing form) from innovative Swedish brand Stierna Equestrian Sportswear — and boy do those Swedes know a thing or two about making clothing that keeps out the cold.
This evening, though, her outdoor coat is firmly on a hook in her tidy, cosy and house plant-filled home in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, and she sports a baby blue sweatshirt. There are few clues in here that Caroline is one of the UK’s most esteemed trainers and a former event rider, barring three framed covers of Horse & Hound hanging on the wall. There are actually more indications of her love of the sea and what lives in it, and a globe-shaped fish tank in the open plan kitchen/living area plays home to a mini shoal of diminutive and active brown/black fish. In fact, Caroline and her husband, Greg, are experienced scuba divers, sometimes exploring the shipwrecks that litter the coastline around Malta, or heading to the likes of the Galapagos or Mexico to investigate the wildlife and the oceans.
On the breakfast bar lies an open laptop. It is 6pm and darkness has descended outside, but the work never stops for Caroline. There are emails to answer, a new academy to benefit up-and-coming riders — “the world-beaters of the future” — to get off the ground, lessons to schedule and clinics to arrange. In fact, tickets to the latter sell like proverbial hot cakes, snapped up almost as fast as for that famous music festival at Glastonbury, which are gone in a matter of minutes.
“I’ve just sent out dates up to March and in a week they will be booked out,” says Caroline. “I only have time to host the occasional clinic, and I pass some on to Simon Grieve and Callum Banfield.”
