What happens when an athlete suffers a life‑changing accident?
By Sonia Oxley BBC Sport
After four months in hospital Saffron Cresswell dreaded going home. She knew the field would be empty. Before the fall that left her paralysed at 23 she had 25 horses that she trained and rode in a business she had run since she was 15 and was a talented eventer on a path toward the Olympics. Eight years earlier her parents had sold their house to buy a yard to support her career, with the family living in two tiny touring caravans for six years before they converted part of a barn into a home. For years Cresswell was up at 5am riding four ponies before school, then more afterwards – if she even went in. She puts her school attendance at “68% or something ridiculous” because she was “so busy riding”. “Busy” in fact turns out to be a common theme with Cresswell. During rehab at the hospital she would wait outside the gym for it to open so she could get an hour in before her physio session was due to start. There had only been five days during the four months where she hadn’t had a visitor and so when she finally returned home to Worcestershire, where the horses had all been sold, reality was anything but hectic. “I came home and fundamentally the next day both my parents went out the door and went to work,” says the now 25‑year‑old Cresswell. “So I was home alone in a house that I couldn’t really get out of and I couldn’t really do anything.” There was only one thing for it: find a new sport. Little did she know that within eight months of sitting in a canoe for the first time she would be heading for a World Championships.
Image source: Saffron Cresswell
Image caption: Saffron Cresswell got into eventing in her teens
Cresswell started riding when she was three, introduced to the sport by her mum, who was “horsey” but “doing low‑level amateur stuff”. And she was hooked. “I was the only child at primary school that was allowed a phone because I used to cycle from my primary school to the yard so I could start riding before my mum came home from work,” she says. She got into eventing “properly” at 13 when she produced her own young pony from beginners level to eventually representing Great Britain at three European championships. She glances at the medals on her wall, saying: “One gold and two team silvers… so that sort of sparked the whole eventing career.” Then came the leap of faith from her parents – “much to my poor brother’s trauma who was not horsey in any way” and was suddenly now sharing a caravan with his older sister – and Cresswell began running the business of riding and competing horses for other people and coaching. Since her accident she has not been back on a horse. Nor does she intend to. “Because I’d done it so seriously and to such a high level that every day was about perfecting my technique and being better I think, to get back on and not be able to do that physically but also not even feel the horse underneath me I think it would just be very disheartening for me,” she says. Instead she coaches, which she says has helped her with what has turned out – surprisingly to her – the thing she would miss the most about pre‑accident life. “[What I miss] is literally just having the horse on the yard to just go and like say ‘hello’ to them over the stable,” she says. “And that comes from somebody who was so busy that I didn’t really have loads of time to do that anyway.” The coaching is one of the new parts of the family business which has had to change since her accident. “The business is basically having to diversify which is still very much an ongoing process,” she says. “My parents had given up so much to build something that allowed me to do the sport. It wasn’t like we were at home and I left home and did this – they were very invested as well. So it’s kind of affected everybody from that side of things.”
Image source: Sophie Taylor
Image caption: Three‑day eventing is like an equestrian triathlon with riders competing in three phases of dressage, cross‑country and showjumping for a cumulative score
Cresswell had been beginning to make her mark at senior level when she was competing at Bramham Horse Trials on 8 June 2024. Three fences before the end of her under‑25 cross‑country round she came off her horse Vivendi Hero. “I remember all of it because I didn’t even get knocked out,” she says. “[It was] just a freak accident.” “I just landed on the back of my head and unfortunately broke my back at T4 level – so chest level – and basically as soon as I fell instantly knew I couldn’t feel my legs.” She remembers an “awful” 45‑minute ambulance ride to Leeds General Infirmary where she had emergency surgery. At that point she wondered whether the damage would be permanent because only a couple of weeks previously she had been chatting to a friend – Olympic silver medallist Nicola Wilson – who had broken her neck in a fall. “She said ‘when I fell I couldn’t feel my arm for 20 minutes and then my feeling came back.’ So when I had my accident I had this really weird thing like I just thought ‘oh it’s fine it’ll be 20 minutes and my feeling will come back,’” she says. Wilson, who visited Cresswell in intensive care, regained her feeling in her legs in three or four weeks. “So I have this really weird thing because then I was sort