Lucinda and Lissa Green

 The six-time Badminton winner Lucinda Green and her 28-year-old daughter Lissa talk to Lucy Higginson about family traits and making the horses pay.

- Lucy Higginson

WHEN it comes to getting a leg up into eventing, you can’t do much better than being the daughter of Lucinda Green. Yet this mother is too much in demand worldwide as a coach to be found — like other riders’ mothers — toiling in the tackroom.

“I’m not here very much,” she concedes. “But I’m useful when there’s a lot of roadwork or cantering.”

With Lissa’s eventer father, David, back in his native Australia, this well connected young lady, now 28, must forget her own path, albeit with abundant advice just a phone call away.

The decision to try following in her parents’ footsteps was not the foregone conclusion it is for some riders’ offspring.

“I’ve always done horses for fun, as a sidenote,” Lissa explains. “For a long time I didn’t even know pony teams existed.” (“And I was very sure I didn’t tell her,” chimes Lucinda.)

“I don’t like copying; I wanted to be my own person,” adds Lissa. “When I did play around in competitions and heard ‘daughter of Lucinda Green’ I thought, ‘For God’s sake, do something else.’”

Startlingly, that something else might have been criminology, which Lissa studied at Bristol for a year.

“I love prisons and criminal minds,” she says. “If I had a non-riding dream job it would be criminal psychology.”

But watching the London Olympics brought a moment of clarity: “Only then did I think, ‘I really love this, I’ve got to give it a try.’”

Flying solo

WITH Lucinda no longer running a yard, that meant flying solo.