We've got each other's backs

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

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 epicenter 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.