Lauren Innes

The amateur event rider balances a fulltime job with five-star competition – and is now eyeing up a first Burghley. Martha Terry finds out how she does it

- Martha Terry

LAUREN INNES is no ordinary accountant. Amateur riders lining up to compete at Burghley, arguably the biggest and most daunting of the five-stars, are as rare as hen’s teeth. Lauren competes just one (equally extraordinary) horse, Global Fision M, whom she has produced from a five-year-old alongside a full-time job at KPMG. No groom, no flashy facilities, no string of also-rans to complement her top horse and give her experience up the levels.

“The top riders I’m competing against probably do the same number of runs in a weekend that I do in a season,” muses the 32-year-old, who has two Badminton cross-country clears under her five-star belt. “But I’ve said since ‘Flipper’ was a five-year-old that he’s a Burghley horse, because he loves huge jumps, and he loves to gallop – and that is what Burghley is.”

Lauren seems to thrive in elite company. Academically, as an Oxford graduate with a master’s in investment banking, she applied to the “big four” global accountancy firms and was offered places at three of them. As a sportswoman, Badminton and Burghley are her natural goals even if there’s little amateur precedent showing it can be done.

Lauren got a taste for international competition through student riders, when she competed for Britain, and later in the European Cup, winning team silver. She knew she wanted to continue competing seriously – “I work to fund my passion”  but also “didn’t want to ride professionally”.

“Mum had drilled it into me that a career in horses is a hard life and encouraged me to consider all my options,” she says. “But I wanted to be competitive so I took my time going into my professional career, doing a lot of teaching and riding over about three gap years.