London calling for Olympian Dixon (From The Northern Echo)

London calling for Olympian Dixon

12:03pm Saturday 14th August 2010 in

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KAREN Dixon has forgotten that I’m coming – the customary effect on folk – apologises, suggests I wait in the kitchen while she sees a man about a horse. It’s a mistake, an incorrigible invitation to inquisitiveness.

Framed above the door to the dining room are magazines on which she’s been cover girl – Horse and Hound, Eventing and – hello – Hello. On the door are signs urging “Beware: grumpy old woman.”

Surely they can’t mean the lovely, ever-friendly, always talkative three-day eventer who’s successfully competed in three Olympics, won team gold and individual bronze in the world horse trials and who never for a moment has let it go to her hard hat?

“Ask the kids,” she says, upon returning.

The kids, bright as best tack, are Rory, 11, and sevenyear- old Tara. Their infant drawings adorn the kitchen wall, alongside little sticky aides memoire and a blackboard on which are written some of the day’s needs.

“Three kitchen bulbs, bin liners, beer, wine and lager,” it says. There’s a fridge magnet, too. “Cooking with wine is fun,” it reads. “Sometimes I even put it in the food.”

The Daily Mail on the worktop is four days old and has never been opened. It wouldn’t take a latter-day Holmes to discern a busy household.

“Chaos,” says Karen, and puts the kettle on.

We’d hoped to meet around a month ago when word arrived that she and husband Andrew were planning to sell the 18th century Wycliffe Grange – a few miles east of Barnard Castle – and move to Northern Ireland. Andrew’s father is Lord Glentoran.

For two weeks the voicemail message remained unacknowledged, surprising in one so unfailingly courteous. Then Karen rang to report that she’d been in a serious car crash, written off her Mercedes and hadn’t done herself much good, either.

“Bashed my shoulder, bit of whiplash, lots of physio and back to the doctor with headaches. I couldn’t work for two weeks, still have nightmares every night that that green and yellow van is coming towards me.

“I’m a great believer in fate, what will be will be, but that was close as I want to get.”

It happened just a couple of miles away, on the twisting road between Forcett and Caldwell as she returned from helping at a local Pony Club event.

“People, including my father, always said that the worst accidents happened close to home. The other chap never even braked. He hit me at probably 55-60mph and hadn’t braked.”

The van overturned, though the driver escaped with minor injuries. Forced into a hedge and then back onto the road, Karen finally got out through the front passenger door.

“The policeman said that if it hadn’t been a Merc I’d have broken my leg at least.

“It broke my back axle.

That’s something else – to do that in a Mercedes.”

She’s now 46, still much involved with horses, this week eagerly back in the saddle. Tempting like a fourlegged Lorelei, the London Olympics calls.

ELAINE Straker, her mother, was also a well-known horsewoman but is now unwell. Karen grew up in nearby Little Hutton, moved around North Yorkshire when her parents divorced, met Andrew after the Seoul Olympics when he was in sports marketing and she was looking for a sponsor.

Love at first sight?

“Oh, yes.”

He’s still in management consultancy, but was away sailing around the Western Isles. “If he’s sailing he’s happy, like me with horses,”

says Karen.

The day after our chat she was up at 4am, drove the horse box to Northamptonshire, took part in a dressage timed for 8.50am and was home for what she hoped would be a late lunch.

“I just want to carry on riding, I wouldn’t be much good on the streets. I need to be entertained, and horses are my great entertainment.”

We talk of the death in March of Get Smart, the horse with which she achieved international acclaim, of the five-ringed siren song, of the sports politics which suggest that she mightn’t altogether enjoy the 2012 Games, anyway.

“What I really mean is the politics of selection. You have to jump through so many hoops these days. In our day if you were good enough you got in.”

Not horses for courses, then? She pauses, visibly shudders.

“The higher you go in the sport the more it affects you, the more the politics come into play. It’s about your face fitting, or whatever.

“Even at my last Olympics in Sydney there was a lot of political crap involved in the whole thing. I don’t really want to know.”

GET Smart was the horse she’d spotted in a field near Northallerton, looking at her over a hedge. He was put down on March 1, aged 30, a heartbreaking decision taken after his teeth fell out.

“They don’t make false teeth for horses, so far as I know,” says Karen, with no hint of flippancy.

A bronze of Get Smart, given by co-owner Jack Brignall, stands on the dining room table. Too Smart, another old favourite, is 26 and still stabled in the yard.

“I didn’t want to see him suffer. He’d been such a good servant to me, such a wonderful horse. It’s awful, isn’t it, but you wish you could do it for humans as well.

“Get Smart couldn’t keep the weight. He was unhappy and that wasn’t him at all.

He’d always been my favourite, always been a character.

“Too Smart is a great horse, too, but he was never the same person as Get Smart was. It was a terrible decision, but in the end I couldn’t see him struggle any longer.”

Now, however, she has Moet and Piper – “Oh, I know, champagne this time” – two young and fresh horses who suggest such great promise that 2012 still whispers.

Heart and head?

“It’s quite tempting, I have to say. Mary King’s still at it, everyone’s still at it, but I’m trying to run a business, not make headlines any more, and that’s really now my priority. I’ll continue to ride so long as I feel I’m doing the horses justice, but if someone offered me money for them I’d probably take it.

“If you’ve a good horse, if you’re sitting on something decent, you never know, but the bank manager rules both my heart and my head.

“I want my kids to be happy and healthy. If I can help them to do that then I’ll be happy, too.”

Just the day previously, Rory and Tara had both done well at a Pony Club event in Northumberland. Rory has qualified with the Zetland Pony Club for the Pony Club championships on August 28.

Their mum doubts, however, that they’ll follow her highriding course.

“I don’t think Andrew would let me. They’re good kids, noisy kids, happy kids, sporty kids. I’ve had an incredibly happy, fulfilling life. Now my priority is them.”

THEY won’t move to Ireland until September 2012, when Rory finishes at Aysgarth School in Wensleydale.

“He might forget to ring me for two weeks and then say that he’s been building a den, it’s what kids are like,”

says his mum, with manifest affection.

Having failed to find a suitable property, they hope to build their own. If Wycliffe Grange sells first, they hope to rent somewhere nearby.

Particularly, says Karen, she’ll miss the River Tees – “I think it’s fantastic” – and her many friends. “I must know everyone in Barney.”

There’ll still be horses, still be competition, still life’s ups and downs – but after surviving what could have been the biggest tumble of her life. Karen Dixon is again one jump ahead.

How grass roots have withered

ON WEDNESDAY evening to Darlington RA – good match, £3 admission, mayor in mufti behind the bar – where a poignant programme piece underlined the extent to which grass roots football has withered.

Just 20 years ago, recalled Martin Jackson, he’d represented Whessoe Sports Club at the annual meeting of the Darlington District League, one of six clubs vying for three second division vacancies.

Now the Darlington District and the Darlington Church and Friendly leagues don’t even exist.

Ten years ago he was part of the RA set-up that won four trophies. None is any longer contested.

Most of the playing fields have gone, too, the penalty areas (as Martin notes) now probably someone’s back lawn.

Even Hundens Lane, where goal posts stretched to infinity – “over 20 pitches, and the biggest blackboard you’ve ever seen, listing all the games” – now has just six.

A town which until recently supported two Saturday leagues now has just seven Saturday teams, excluding the Quakers. Two play out of the RA, three are in the Crook and District League. That’s the nearest there is.

BORO surveyors unite: Tuesday’s column – with thanks to Les Wilson in Guisborough, Brian Dixon in Darlington and Clive Hepworth in goodness-knows-where – was mistaken to suppose that Middlesbrough failed to reach the old first division in 1987-88.

Bruce Rioch’s side did, indeed, lose their last game – home to Leicester – but redeemed themselves through the play-offs, beating Bradford City and Chelsea.

Chelsea, first division members, had lost just twice at home. The match, says Clive, was notable for the level of violence against Boro’s jubilant supporters.

It was the only occasion on which a top flight side has been relegated through the play-offs. They changed the system the following season.

What was remarkable was that just two season earlier the Teesside club had been bankrupt, locked out of Ayresome Park, and that most of the players had helped steer them from third division to first.

Their glory was brief, eighteenth place the following season ensuring a swift return.

“One season wonders, I’m afraid,” says Les.

NOT least because he was there, Brian Dixon also noted Tuesday’s paragraph on Newport County’s last-ever Football League win – May 2 1988, at Darlington.

The teams meet again today.

However much he may wish to have forgotten the match, Brian is also frequently reminded that it was his wife’s birthday.

“I sure know how to treat a lady,” he says – and asks for 267 other offences to be taken into consideration.

SOME things take a little longer: many years ago we tried to find evidence that Sunderland had once played in the black and white of Newcastle United. John Briggs provides it at last.

It was January 27 1951, FA Cup fourth round, home to Southampton.

Competition rules required both teams to change in the event of a colour clash, but the second choice white shirts clashed, too.

The Saints borrowed amber shirts from the Hampshire Regiment while Sunderland and Newcastle simply swapped – and both still earned their stripes.

Newcastle beat Bolton Wanderers 3-2 before a 67,000 crowd while 61,000 crowded Roker Park to see Sunderland do it in black and white, winning 2-0. Len Shackleton scored.

And finally

WHICH leads us finally to the identity of the Newcastle player who first observed that Newport, beaten 13-0, were lucky to get none. It was, of course, Shack.

Terry Wells today invites readers to identify of the shortest-lived Football League manager of all time.

Ephemeral as ever, the column returns on Tuesday.