IN the white-hot furnace of supremacy that is the Olympic Games, it is easy to forget that for most of the modern Olympics’ 128-year history they were, at least in principle, confined to amateur competitors. The “three values of Olympism” are excellence, respect and friendship, as embodied in the Victorian ideal of the Corinthian: the gentleman amateur sportsman, who competes to test himself and for the love of it.
Perhaps nowhere in horse sport have these attributes been better personified than by Chris Collins, whose exploits in first racing and then eventing while a highly successful businessman in the 1960s and 1970s made headlines far beyond Horse & Hound and the Sporting Life.
Very little is missing from his résumé, which starts with third in the 1965 Grand National and includes being the first Englishman since World War I to win the Pardubice, twice champion amateur jockey, triumphs in both the Aintree and Cheltenham Foxhunters, fourth at Burghley, four top-10 placings at Badminton and five championships as part of the British eventing team. But riding at the Olympics is one box he was never able properly to tick.
“My final competition was on the British team at the 1980 substitute Olympics at Fontainebleau,” he says – an “alternative Olympics” being arranged as then prime minister Margaret Thatcher had ordered all athletes to boycott the main Games in Moscow. “Eventing immediately obeyed without any consultation with the riders, whereas the likes of Seb Coe and Steve Ovett did go.
“Fontainebleau went badly – I had a fall and got knocked out, so didn’t complete. It wasn’t a glorious ending to my riding career,” he says with a smile that still bears a hint of competitive regret 44 years later.
Chris did go to the next Games, in Los Angeles (LA) in 1984, as chairman of selectors, a role he took on after retiring from riding in 1980.
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