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Boyd Exell's Excellent Adventure
©Rinaldo de Craen/FEI
From riding Hackney Pony teams at 16, the boy from Bega now has such scalps as a gold medal from the World Equestrian Games in Kentucky, World Four-in Hand Championship gold from Riesenbeck and eight British National Champion titles. Boyd Exell is also the first driver to win both the World Cup Driving Final and Aachen four years in a row.
BY CHRIS STAFFORD
FOUR-IN-HAND CARRIAGE driver Boyd Exell has become a tour de force in the sport and continues to intimidate his rivals by collecting trophies and records wherever he goes. But then, he has been a man with driving ambitions since he was knee-high to a fetlock. Although he may have had moments of wanting to go show jumping and get into pony club activities like other horse-mad children, an opportune meeting steered him towards the box seat and, before he had reached double digits, his life’s path was laid. The journey began in the picturesque Bega Valley in the South West region of New South Wales, close to the Tasman Sea. The son of an engineer and schoolteacher, and with two brothers and a sister who did not share his passion for horses, Boyd followed his maternal grandmother’s footsteps – she had show hunters in Ireland. And then his mother introduced him to a family friend who was involved in driving Hackney horses.
Growing up close to the coast, Boyd naturally spent his childhood with the rest of the family sailing and water skiing, but it was competitive tennis that he excelled at: “I was actually better at it than I was with horses but my love was horses so that’s what I focused on. I remember I was quite disappointed the first day I saw cart horses but within a couple of days I only saw the horses, not the carriages,” he recalls. He used to admire coaching prints, and it was his love of horses that was the driving force.
At 16, Boyd drove a Hackney Pony team to win the Australian National Championships, and to mark his 21st birthday his mother offered him the choice of a party or a round-the-world ticket. Not surprisingly his adventurous spirit called and he set sail for the Americas, finding opportunities beckoning him to Chicago and Kentucky. He spent several months at Richard J. Stevenson’s Haflinger Stud at Tudor Oaks Farm in Illinois breaking in riding and driving horses, but with its geographical challenges for equestrian sport comparable to Australia, he soon realised he needed to be in Europe to focus on the sport more intensely. “Having reached the top of the sport back home I wanted to see how I rated in Europe and I would never know until I went there. I thought I’d be back home within a month but 20 years later I’m still going round the world.”
The choice between Germany and England was made easier by the language and the offers of jobs. However, Boyd found the culture in England very different to the US. In America they were happy to give him a chance and he could speak his mind, but he felt in the UK that he had to prove himself and it was best to be modest. The famous carriage driver, Alwyn Holder, and a team of Welsh Cobs provided Boyd with an opportunity he couldn’t refuse to gain valuable experience on which to build a reputation in Europe. So the summer of 1994 was spent learning to keep a team of horses on the road on the English and European circuit.
Other jobs came along, such as breaking a team of horses for a Swedish client in the New Forest, then for a year producing three-to-five-year-olds before training a horse pair at the stables of a girlfriend in Surrey. Although only receiving a modest income, he soon realised that teaching was generating a comparable return and he is now a sought-after trainer. After five years in Surrey he spent a couple of years in Windsor followed by another five years in Buckinghamshire. At that time his wife was eventing in Leicestershire and the appeal of its bucolic agricultural community soon enticed them to set up home there to raise their children, James and Olivia.
Over time he built up a business and reputation for buying and selling horses that he produced himself. With the help of friends lending him equipment, he was able to establish his own stables and, to break out on his own, Boyd bought Irish horses. “They were great for me to start off with because they have good temperaments. I used to hunt them in the winter with the Surrey Union and the Fernie, and drive them in the summer. The weather never put me off because it was very mild and, although you’d have to dress for wet weather, it never stopped you from doing what you wanted to do.”
These days, though, Boyd uses the winter months to visit Australia to take a break from horses and enjoy the water sports he loves and the ocean he misses most about home. "By going back in winter, I avoid the worst weather and warm my bones,”
he says.
His debut on the European continent was at Riesenbeck in the World Pairs Championship in 1997, where he finished eighth and the next time he came 18th. “I didn’t realise how well I’d done the first time.” Four years later another opportunity to compete on the continent came about by accident caused by an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in England. As he was heading south to compete in the National Championships at Windsor in 2001, he heard it had been cancelled, so he called Donaueschingen Show in Germany and asked permission for a late entry, although the detour involved 26 hours of driving!
Boyd Exell’s trophy cabinet boasts the spoils of international success, including the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games gold medal from Kentucky followed by the 2012 World Four-in Hand Championship gold medal from Riesenbeck, Germany. In addition, he is eight-time British National Champion and in 2012 became the first driver to win the FEI World Cup Driving Final for four consecutive years as well as the first driver to win the prestigious Aachen title for four consecutive years; five in total.
His impressive portfolio has been built on a solid foundation of learning from the grand masters of the sport. “I learned a lot from stealing with my eyes,” he acknowledges, from people like Britain’s George Bowman and Germany’s Michael Freund and Christoph Sandman. “I stole as many ideas as I could from them and put them into practice.” He also observed which breeds they used and learned to select horses that would help him in the sport. In the beginning Boyd switched from Irish horses to Gelderlanders, who he claimed, “would win the public but lose the judges. Nowadays, I tend to use the power of the Gelderlanders and the easiness of the Oldenburgs.”
The Exell team is now represented by some 45 horses, of which two are hunters, 15 are black horses for the outdoor team; nine are bay horses for the indoor team – a mixture of Russian Orlov, Holsteiner and Cleveland Bay cross Thoroughbred imported from Bob Edwards in Australia. The staff includes two principle grooms, Lisa Banks and Michelle Kenny, as well as his wife who does a lot of the schooling. “My job now mostly involves training in America, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, so I tend to spend four days away and three at home,” Boyd says. Home now is a 75-acre farm south-east of Leicester in the heart of the Midlands and prime horse country.
Aside from selling around 50-60 horses a year, Exell has a secondary business providing vehicles for horsedrawn weddings and funerals for which he draws on six white and six black Friesians, depending on the occasion.
Having made his way to the top of the sport in Europe, Boyd feels that sponsorship is not always about success because there are always people who are willing to help you if you work hard and create your own opportunity. “Sponsorship is often a relationship and they want to help people on the journey. A lot of the time when you’re at the top you don’t get the sponsors because everyone assumes you’ve made it.”
Like all equestrians who emigrate to Europe for experience and competition, Boyd recognises that the quality of your competitors raises your game. And as his mentor George Bowman advised him: You have to learn how to lose before you can learn how to win. "I always go in aiming to be in the top three and get the best performance out of my horses,” says Boyd.
Given its current horsepower, Team Exell clearly has some unfinished business with records still to be broken, so it’s going to be a while before this charismatic Aussie trades the box seat for water skis for more than a few weeks in winter.
This article first appeared in a previous edition of Equestrian Life magazine. For more information or to subscribe, visit our home page here.
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