Royal Agony: Zara Phillips Horse Injured, Later Euthanized, After Falling at French Event

TSUNAMI II Zara Phillips, originally uploaded by rallycarter.

At the four-star three-day event at Pau in the south of France on Saturday, British rider and reigning world champion eventer Zara Phillips took a bad fall with her horse Tsunami II.

According to our friends at Horse and Hound, the horse did not die on course but was transported to a veterinary clinic and later euthanized because a vertebrae inher neck was fractured.

Phillips broke her collarbone in the fall.

Tsunami II was Phillips' up and coming horse; Pau was their first four-star effort. The mare, owned and bred by Irish rider Melanie Duff, was being groomed as Phillips' hope for the 2012 Olympics, to be held in London, just down the road from her grandmother's home at Buckingham Palace.

Phillips is the daughter of Princess Anne, who also competed at high level in eventing...and also rode racehorses! A last-minute injury to Phillips' horse Toytown meant that she missed her chance to represent Great Britain at the 2008 Olympics.

Zara Phillips Comments on Olympics Health Risks for Her Horse After Swiss Team Quits

Reading the horse press from Europe this weekend makes it sound like someone finally got out a world map and saw where Hong Kong is. The equestrian part of the Olympics was moved from Beijing to Hong Kong out of concern for horse diseases and quarantine problems for foreign horses on the mainland.

Last week the Swiss announced that their dressage riders would not risk their horses’ health by making the long trip, which would be stressful, to the extreme heat and humidity of Hong Kong.

How hot is it in Hong Kong in August and September? So hot that they shut down racing for the health of the horses. And that's in a country where racing is a national sport obsession.

One person who is thinking a lot about the possibility of going to Hong Kong is former European champion eventer Zara Phillips of England. Phillips missed the Athens Olympics four years ago when her Toytown was sidelined by a tendon injury.

The Times (of London) caught up with Zara at Switzerland’s St. Moritz ski resort this week, where a winter festival of horse sports—including polo and show jumping, are played in the snow.

Here’s a clip from the article where Zara was asked if she shared the concerns of the Swiss riders:

“Yes, I do have concerns,” says Phillips. “But Toytown is my top horse and he is not going to get to another Olympics, and I might not myself. So what do you do? It’s difficult. I’ve racked my brains about it, but I know if Toytown was a person, he’d say, ‘Don’t be silly, let’s go’.

“We just need to get as much information as we can so that we can make the horses as comfortable as possible. You want them cool but not too cool, you’ve got to be careful about dehydration, but you don’t want to be pestering them all the time. It sounds a nightmare.”