Libby Seed

Libby Seed schools in a field, cold-showers with a bucket before driving to work in hospitals, and prepares for Badminton in her spare time. Martha Terry finds out how she does it

THEY may call her Angel, but Heartbreaker Star Quality was not a match made in heaven for Libby Seed in the early days. Libby was handed the mare as a sales livery when the mare was a six-year-old, and "didn't get on with her at all".

"I used to ride for Carolyn Bates, eventing her stallion Philanderer," says Libby, 26. "I would have seen Angel in the field as a youngster, but I never picked her out. Carolyn had her sold as a six-year-old, but the day she was due to leave, she cut her eye in the stable and got a virus. They thought she might go blind. So Carolyn sent her to me to sell."

” The eye duly resolved, although it’s now a different colour and slightly cloudy, but that wasn’t Libby’s main issue with Angel.

“She used to run out at all the showjumps, walk was not an option ever, and she squealed and screeched constantly,” Libby says. “She jumped like a showjumper, so my parents said we should buy her. I said no way. But they ignored me and bought her anyway.

“She didn’t settle for two years. She was so squealy and had an inability to concentrate. At one novice at Larkhill she did an awful dressage, had two down showjumping and was eliminated cross-country. Jumping is easy for her, but she just didn’t get it. She was in her own world and I wasn’t part of it.”

But Libby kept chipping away at the training, and slowly Angel turned a corner.

“At first it was like two highly strung teenage girls trying to get on, but once she got it she realised she loved it,” Libby says. “At one of her first intermediates I could feel her take a step up; she found it so easy.”