Toytown (horse)

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Medal record
Equestrian
World Equestrian Games
Gold	2006 Aachen	Individual eventing
Silver	2006 Aachen	Team eventing
European Eventing Championship
Gold	2007 Rome	Team gold
Gold	2005 Blenheim	Team gold
Gold	2005 Blenheim	Individual gold

Toytown^[1], a chestnut gelding born in 1992, standing at 17hh and with particularly distinctive markings including a white blaze and white spots, is a British event horse currently owned and ridden by Zara Phillips. The pair compete together at the highest level of the sport.

Toytown's exact breeding is unknown. He was spotted as a 7-year-old novice eventer in 1999 by Zara's father, Mark Phillips, when rider and former owner Meryl Winter went to him for a lesson. Zara bought the horse a few months later^[2] after watching him jump with her stepmother and Dressage coach Sandy Pflueger. Zara has since commented that he "looked a bit like a hat-rack when we first saw him but I got on really well with him^[3]".

Despite Winter's description of him as a 'cross country machine', Toytown was far from a natural Eventer, with a particular lack of respect for Show Jumps - at the Windsor CCI** in 2001, Zara and Toytown entered the ring in the lead only to finish out of the running with six fences down and 25 penalty points.

However, Zara and Toytown's hard work with Mark Phillips in the Show Jumping ring and Pflueger in the Dressage arena put paid to these teething problems, and the pair's first real success came with the Young Rider title at Bramham Horse Trials in 2002, followed by individual silver at the 2002 Young Riders European Championships in Austria.

This success was cemented in their CCI**** debut at Burghley Horse Trials in 2003. Competing at this level for the first time, over a particularly challenging course, Zara and Toytown found themselves in the lead after the cross country and missed overall victory by just one fence, losing to then-world number one Pippa Funnell on her way to the Rolex Grand Slam.

Despite setbacks including a leg injury following Burghley that forced Toytown out of contention for the 2004 Athens Olympics and the entire 2004 season, the pair have gone on to win or finish well at some of the most prestigious competitions in the world, and are contenders for the British Equestrian team competing in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Far from being an easy horse to ride, Zara comments that he "doesn’t like performing these days unless it really matters^[4]" (something he demonstrated at the 2007 Festival of British Eventing when, according to the BBC's equestrian correspondent Clare Balding, he "went complete bonkers and started rearing^[5]" during the Dressage), and that "Toytown, almost always, has to do something to show he is in control^[6]".