Reuters/London


Britain’s Zara Phillips waves after competing in the individual show jumping of the Eventing competition at London Olympics yesterday. She won the silver
Some might say Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughter Zara Phillips was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Now she can also boast a silver medal.
Phillips, daughter of two Olympians, has spent three days on what she called “an emotional rollercoaster” at the Games.
She has not had a moment spare, even to celebrate her first wedding anniversary on Monday with husband and former England rugby captain Mike Tindall.
The hopes of a nation were on her shoulders in this - her first - Olympics.
No pressure then.
Phillips has done well enough to make the cut for the individual eventing final later yesterday, but she is well behind the leaders and is unlikely to mount the podium again.
So is she ready to set her sights on Rio in 2016?
“Steady!” was the heartfelt reply after Britain took second
place in the three-day team eventing. 
Asked if she took any advice from her parents before embarking on the Olympic competition, she replied, quick as a flash, “Not really.”
Phillips is a former World and European champion and only the third rider in the history of the sport to hold both titles at once. She and her old champion Toytown carried the Olympic flame down Cheltenham racecourse before the Games.
Her mother, Princess Anne, was European champion back in 1971 and her father, Mark Phillips, won team gold at the 1972 Olympics and team silver in 1988 in Seoul.
She was kicking herself after knocking a fence down in the showjumping that wrapped up the event after the dressage and all the thrills and spills of the cross-country course, jumping with her appropriately named mount, High Kingdom.
“I messed up and had to get on with it,” she told reporters who clustered around afterwards. “He is a good jumper and he couldn’t get out of where I put him.”
What about the pressure of performing at home?
“I definitely think it is a help. The pressure is what you
put on yourself to get the best score you can for the team.”
The cross-country certainly proved hair-raising.
“I was really happy that he came out and actually jumped
pretty well because he lost both of his front shoes. To come out and do anything for me today (in the showjumping) was pretty incredible.”
Asked what it was like going from a wall of noise on the cross-country course to the pin-drop silence of the showjumping arena, she said: “It makes the noise of the poles falling even louder.”
Meanwhile, Michael Jung and Germany set the gold standard at the London Olympics equestrian arena on Tuesday, winning the individual and team three-day eventing titles.
The Germans, coached by Yorkshire-born Chris Bartle, defended their Beijing team gold with hosts Great Britain fighting off New Zealand for silver in a tense conclusion to the final jumping session.
In front of stands filled to their 20,000-capacity, Jung’s clear round, after equally faultless displays from teammates Dirk Schrade and Sandra Auffrath, gave the 2008 winners an unbeatable lead with 13 riders still to jump.
Jung then created equestrian history, winning the individual competition to become the first rider to hold the European, world and Olympic eventing titles, all this on the day he turned 30.
“You always dream that when everything goes perfectly you can win gold, but I never dreamed I’d have two,” he grinned, weighing the two bright medals hung around his neck in the palms of his hands.
“Now I’m going to have dinner with my family, and then party...”
In silver came Sweden’s Sara Algotsson-Ostholt, who suffered wretched ill luck as she was on target to become the first woman to take the title only for her grey mare Wega to knock the top pole off the final fence.
That heart-wrenching blunder left her with a combined total after the dressage and cross country of 43.30 points, behind Jung on 40.60.
“Shit happens,” she shrugged.
Asked at the post-event press conference to elaborate on what had gone wrong the Swedish rider said: “At the triple combination before the last fence I told her (Wega) to be careful, to slow down.
“I tried to do the same at the last, but she didn’t react so quickly and was too fast at it and just put down a toe.”
As Algotsson-Ostholt approached the last with one hand on the gold medal Jung, watching from the stands having already gone clear, recalled: “I was very happy with my second place - but now my first place is even better.”
There was a sense of deja vu at Greenwich Park as four years ago in Beijing, Germany also picked up both titles, with Algotsson-Ostholt’s husband Frank Ostholt part of the team event.