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Toytown is a retired British event horse owned and formerly ridden by Zara Phillips. Toytown is a chestnut gelding born in 1992, standing at 17hh and with particularly distinctive markings including a white blaze and white spots. Toytown and Phillips competed together at the highest level of the sport until the horse's retirement in 2011, after accruing 1,421 British Eventing points in his career. ==Background== Toytown's exact breeding is unknown. "Noddy" 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 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." 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. Far from being an easy horse to ride, Zara comments that he "doesn’t like performing these days unless it really matters" (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" during the Dressage), and that "Toytown, almost always, has to do something to show he is in control."〔Zara Phillips, quoted in the Daily Telegraph (Issue 47,328:Saturday 4 August 2007 page S23)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Toytown (horse)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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