'My partner died - but years later I saved my husband's life

Show jumper Faye Riddington-Smith feared history would repeat itself when she had to perform CPR for a second time, she tells new

- SUE LEE

When she heard the sickening thud from the hallway, Faye Riddington-Smith knew exactly what it was.

“I sat there for a couple of seconds on the couch because I didn’t want to confront reality,” recalls the Team GB show jumper. “For a brief moment I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. Then I sprang into action.”

Within moments she was performing CPR on her husband Jason, an actor who had suffered a catastrophic brain aneurysm.

Her quick thinking that day almost two years ago helped save his life, although the experience has changed them both.

And for Faye, 47, there is an added layer of poignancy and trauma, as the event triggered memories of her former partner’s sudden collapse and another moment where she had to perform CPR to try to save a man she loved.

“How can that happen twice to the same person?” asks Faye, shaking her head in bewilderment. “They say life’s biggest stressors are bereavement, divorce and serious illness and I’ve seen all three. But no matter how tough something is, there is always a happy day again. You have to believe that.”

The day we meet is one of those happy days for Faye, who combines her riding career with a business as a personal fitness trainer, chatting from the home she shares with 54-year-old Jason in Buckinghamshire.

He pops by to say hello and they speak with the easy domestic shorthand of a couple who know each other inside out. Yet in June 2021 things could have turned out very differently.

“Jason had been cycling and at some point as he went up a steep hill he felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped in his head,” Faye recalls. “He was sick on the ride back and again at home, but at the time I didn’t think too much of it.”