We’re celebrating 10 years of An Eventful Life
This website and everything it has now become started in 2010 with the book An Eventful Life – Life Stories of Eventing Champions
We thought we’d celebrate with 10 facts you may not know about us …..
It all started with a book …..
The book, An Eventful Life, published in 2010, provides a written and pictorial insight into the lives of five elite Australian eventing riders; Megan Jones, Sonja Johnson, Shane Rose, Wendy Schaeffer and Stuart Tinney.
A Fund-Raiser for Kentucky WEG 2010
The book was launched at the Melbourne International 3 Day Event in June 2010 as a fundraiser for the five Australian-based Olympic riders aiming for the World Equestrian Games in Kentucky in 2010.
Soon after, Megan Jones, Sonja Johnson and Stuart Tinney were selected to compete for Australia at WEG 2010; unfortunately Megan’s horse could not compete at the event due to travel sickness and US-based Australian rider Peter Atkins replaced her while Stuart, Sonja, Paul Tapner and Sam Griffiths made up the Australian team.
We travelled to WEG to follow their story and our online blog started to become very popular!
Why these riders?
Stuart, Sonja, Shane, Wendy and Stuart were all Olympic medallists, they were all aiming for further medals and they were all based in Australia. This was complemented by an additional chapter on an up and coming rider, Emma Scott, to give an insight into how younger Australian riders view the world of professional equestrian sport.
Chris Burton also competed as an individual at Kentucky 2010 and Chris was the other person we were considering featuring in the book as the ‘up and coming’ young star who was then still Australian-based. We eventually decided on Emma Scott, who gave up competing a few years later, while Chris went on to become one of the biggest names in the sport (yep, we don’t always get it right …!!)
The 2010 Melbourne International 3DE launch
We chose to launch at the Melbourne 3 Day Event partly because all riders would be attending the event so it was a great chance for autograph signings (which were a lot of fun!) but also because the company that published it, Palmer Higgs Pty Ltd, owned by Paul and Debbie Higgs, had sponsored the event for the previous seven years
Is An Eventful Life based in Australia or UK?
The Australian company that runs An Eventful Life is also owned by Paul and Debbie Higgs.
They are Australia residents but both are British; Debbie was born in Yorkshire and attended University in London before first coming to Australia while Paul moved to Australia as a 14-year-old with his family from London and attended Melbourne High School. They now split their time between England and Australia
Alison Duthie
The book was written by Alison Duthie, also born in the UK but now resident in Australia.
In her past life Alison was Ian Stark’s groom in 1988 when he came first and second at Badminton with his great horses - Sir Wattie and Glenburnie - and also when he won a silver medal on Sir Wattie at the Seoul Olympics. During the next few years Alison worked for many other top event riders at European and World Championships and was a team groom at several British Young Rider Championships during the era of Pippa Funnell, Tina Cook and William Fox-Pitt. She went on to become William's head girl before moving to Australia.
When the book was being produced, Alison’s children were quite small - her oldest son Thomas now helps us film at events in Australia!
International reach
The blog attached to the book An Eventful Life was re-launched in 2012 as an online magazine covering the world of eventing. Its international appeal is reflected in its subscriber base, not just from Australia, New Zealand and the UK, but also Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore to name a few
Cross Country Videos
An Eventful Life is the home of Cross Country Videos with the largest archive of cross country video footage available.
We have filmed over 70,000 eventing competitors at over 150 events in Australia, New Zealand and the UK from 5* level (Burghley and the Australian International 3 Day Event) to grass roots and uploaded over 9,000 videos to An Eventful Life, creating one of the most significant libraries of footage available whilst becoming the best-known international provider of cross country videos to riders around the world
PhD Sponsorship – Eventing Safety
In 2019 we began co-sponsorship of a 3 year PhD with Nottingham Trent University, utilising An Eventful Life's video footage to help identify and reduce the risk of injury to horse and rider in eventing
Video Training
Our footage is used for various levels of training, including the British World Class Programme and risk management within the sport. More recently expert eventing coaches, Lucinda and Lissa Green and Caroline Moore have joined us to offer cross country video training, providing advice and feedback as to how you can improve your competition performance as well as general riding skills
Plus two 'million' stats we really love!
- We've filmed riders over 1,000,000 cross country fences
- In 2019 our video views on Facebook reached over 1.1 million minutes viewed
We're looking forward to the next 10 years - thank you for being part of our journey!
