Mark Phillips

Captain Mark Phillips of the 1st Queen’s Dragoon Guards was educated at Marlborough and the RMC Sandhurst. After being selected as a reserve for the 1968 Olympics, his first major success came in 1970 when he was a member of the British three-day event team that won the World Championship in Chicago. The following year he was on the winning team at the European championships and in 1972 he won an Olympic gold medal in München.

He competed in the Olympics for a second time in 1988 and although forced to withdraw before the cross-country stage because his horse sustained a pulled muscle, he won a silver medal as the fourth member of the team. Phillips was a four-time champion at the Badminton Horse Trials – 1971-72, 74, and 1981.

In 1973 Captain Phillips married HRH Princess Anne but they subsequently separated, and were divorced in 1992. He later married Sandy Pflueger, an American Olympic equestrienne, although they separated in 2012 when Phillips had become involved with another American Olympic rider Lauren Hough. In 1974, he was appointed a CVO.