‘Damn, I’ll have to do a ranking class now!’ rider who broke neck takes second HOYS title

An amateur rider who broke her neck in 2019 – and snapped her collarbone a year later – has won her second Horse of the Year Show (HOYS) Events Through a Lens Talent Seekers title.

Chantelle Duggan and Margaret Duggan’s 10-year-old Linton De La Chappelle, whose names are already on the roll of honour from 2020, blazed their way round the jump-off to finish two seconds faster than Leo Lamb and the mighty Gmail, who took the seven-year-old championship title.

First into the jump-off Chloe Winchester and her own Jupiter had gone clear with power and purpose, then Leo and Carron Nicol’s powerhouse zipped over the finish line a second and a half ahead. But Chantelle and the fiery Larc De Triomphe gelding were galloping from the off, finishing with a mighty leap over the final oxer.

“It feels amazing,” she said. “My partner’s been telling me to jump bigger and do some ranking classes and I said ‘I’ll do one if I win at HOYS’. So now I’m like ‘Damn’!”

Chantelle, who works full-time as a claims inspector for NFU Mutual, is used to travelling the country solo in pursuit of her equestrian dreams.

“I drove 300 miles, six and a half hours, to the qualifier at Chard and before that, he’d jumped the first fence at another show and bucked me off,” she said. “Mum said ‘Why are you driving all that way after that and I said ‘Shut up, Mum’. Then he jumped terrible on the first day and she said ‘What are you doing?’ – and when I won the qualifier, she said ‘Shall I stop talking now?’!”

Chantelle admitted she has “had a few accidents” – in 2019, she sustained three fractures to four vertebrae, slipped a disk and was lucky not to be paralysed. She then snapped her collarbone a year later, in a rotational fall.

“I’ve got pins and plates and a cage in my neck, which restricts my movement,” she said. “In a jump-off, I can’t turn just my head, I turn my whole body, which maybe helps!

“It’s a disease, [horses], if I didn’t do this, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Chantelle bought Linton De La Chappelle as an unbacked four-year-old, and has produced him since. She described him as “tricky” – and he enjoyed a few bucks in both rounds at HOYS tonight.

“I always knew he was talented, it was just a case of channelling the talent in the right direction!” she said.

You might also be interested in:

Championship title for working rider told she ‘may never ride again’ and her ‘horse of a lifetime’ *H&H Plus*

Find out more about Chantelle Duggan, who was told a year ago that it was possible she may never ride

‘I was poo-picking when I got the call to say I’d broken my neck — I could have been paralysed’

‘Now I have a new neck with permanent pins and plates!’

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