Marlborough's Jock Paget heads for Rio with New Zealand's fancied eventing team
Jock Paget For Marlborough based eventing rider Jock Paget, the Rio Olympics will be his second Games with New Zealand's team. He was part of the Kiwis' bronze medal winning team at the London Olympics.
In the midst of preparations to go to the Aachen horse show, he told Marlborough.News that New Zealand has a really strong squad. He and Jonelle Price (Minal) have Olympic experience, she has World Championships experience and Clarke Johnstone is in great form. And then there is Sir Mark Todd: "Well, he's done everything - a few times."
In fact it will be the seventh Olympics at which Todd (who is based at Badgerstown) has competed for New Zealand and the ninth in which he has been involved. He was selected for the boycotted Moscow Games, he was in team in 1996 but his horse went lame and, after his 'retirement', he was the team trainer in 2004.
The squad for Rio has Tim Price as its travelling reserve and the very experienced Blyth Tait as its non-travelling reserve.
With a rueful smile, Jock Paget adds a word of caution about Olympic prospects: "We went to the World Championships as a favoured team and it all went terribly wrong - except for Jonelle. We just have to do well on the day - and hope that's enough."
Jock is taking the 17-year-old gelding Clifton Lush to Rio: "He's been an amazing horse for me." He has ridden Clifton Lush for five years and together they have been third and sixth at Badminton, been placed fifth at Burghley twice, won the Bramham International in 2011 and the British Open Championship in 2013.
Jock Paget and Clifton LushAlso travelling with Jock and Clifton Lush will be senior groom Anke Hoyer. The team will be supplying all that is needed by way of logistic, veterinary and farriery staff.
Not long after the London Olympics Jock suffered a major problem that threatened his future and took a great deal of perseverance to resolve. After winning Burghley in 2013 - a major success as that year it was an especially tough field - his horse Clifton Promise failed a drugs test.
He knew that he and his stable staff had not purposefully fed any banned substance to the horse and he had been using the same feed and supplement without any problems for many years.
With the help of his sponsors and his home federation - Equestrian Sports New Zealand - he set out to discover how the test had been failed.
He found an endurance rider whose horse had been failed because of the same substance. This rider had used a veterinary practice which knew how to look for contamination. They tested everything in the yard from buckets to taps and did DNA tests to get a timeline so they could tell exactly when the rogue substance had been introduced.
It turned out that a supplement that Jock had been using for years had become contaminated before it reached the yard. A weed had got into a batch and in an unnoticed reaction produced the banned chemical.
Fortunately the manufacturer had kept a sample of the batch from which Clifton Promise had been fed. They sent it for testing and the result was positive.
It had taken Jock ten months to be totally exonerated and clear his name. Clifton Promise was retired earlier this year.
With the Olympics approaching, Jock did not want to risk a repeat of that stressful episode. Clifton Lush has been independently tested and so has the current batch of the supplement and feed. Both were declared clean so he has bought enough of that batches to last through the Olympics: "We know everything we're using is safe."
Jock Paget is 32 years-old. He was born in New Zealand but moved to Australia when he was five. He came to riding quite late: "Where I grew up there no horses to be seen."
He left school at 15 and worked as an apprentice bricklayer. Four years later he rode a horse his father had bought, and when his apprenticeship was complete, he got a job as a working pupil.
Aged 26 he came to Britain with Clifton Promise and was based in Surrey till he moved to Wiltshire at the end of 2014: "We call Wiltshire the eventing capital of the world."
He married last November and lives near Marlborough.
Since his comeback Jock has been doing well again. Jock took Clifton Signature to ninth place in Germany's premier eventing competition, the Aachen three star, well into the prize money. He was 2.20 points behind his fellow New Zealand team member Jonelle Price who took seventh place.
Jock's main sponsor is AnaCap Financial Partners with support from other companies including The Pure Feed Company and Childeric UK. You can watch a short video made by Cavewood Productions here.