Piggy March among those tackling epic Cycle4Caroline ride to raise half a million pounds for charity

Double five-star winner Piggy March and her husband Tom will lead a group of eight cyclists on a 1100k ride from Blair Castle to London this autumn, a challenge named Cycle4Caroline.

They will aim to raise half a million pounds for Spinal Research and the British Eventing (BE) Support Trust in memory of Tom’s sister Caroline, who passed away in March this year after sustaining life-changing injuries in an eventing fall in April 2022.

“It’s been very difficult for all her friends and family and we found ourselves a bit lost in terms of where we were going and what to do with ourselves,” said Tom, explaining the idea for the ride came out of a discussion over lunch with former event rider Tommy Howe, now a director of body protector manufacturer Racesafe.

“He was talking about riding from London to Paris, then Piggy said she’d be up for that and another beer later, it was spiralling out of control.”

The ride will start at Blair Castle on 20 November and finish at the Savoy Hotel in London on 30 November, the day of the BE Support Trust ball at the venue. Along the way, it will take in all the British CCI4*-L and CCI5* venues – Blair, Bramham, Burghley, Badminton and Blenheim – as well as Belsay, Chatsworth and Windsor.

Joining Tom and Piggy on Cycle4Caroline will be Tommy Howe, Ian Stark (chair of trustees for the BE Support Trust), Piggy’s sister Nini French, event rider Holly Woodhead, Brett Bullimore (husband of medal-winning event rider Sarah) and Alastair Wilson, who is joint-patron of the BE Support Trust with his wife Nicola Wilson, who suffered life-changing spinal injuries in a fall at Badminton Horse Trials in 2022. Special guests will join for sections along the way.

Training has started for most of the core participants, with some good-natured joshing at the event launch today at Piggy’s yard in Maidwell, Northamptonshire.

“It’s downhill from Scotland to London – what can go wrong?” said Alastair.

Tom explained gently: “That’s not the case – and there’s a reason everyone cycles from Land’s End to John O’Groats, which is the prevailing wind, but we only learnt that after we’d set the route, so we’re looking forward to lots of wind in our faces in November.”

The group’s route will involve some significant hills when they stop in at Ian Stark’s home near Selkirk – “I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea, looking at the topography map,” said Tom – as well as when they visit Chatsworth.

“Having a support system is fantastic”

The group hope Cycle4Caroline will raise half a million pounds through donations and partnering with businesses. The money raised will be split equally between Spinal Research and the BE Support Trust.

Alastair said: “The BE Support Trust were very good to Nicola and me when we were in trouble two years ago. When you are at rock bottom, having a support system to get hold of you is fantastic.

“You can lose your sport, your business and it’s a lonely place to be. And they help people with less serious injuries, too.”

BE Support Trust general manager Jane Hunter-Walsh said the money will be “transformative” for the charity, which was founded in 2021 to support the physical and mental health of BE competing members. It has helped over 60 people since then.

“The average beneficiary has six sessions, at a cost of £540, and when someone has a life-changing injury, supporting them can run into six figures,” she said.

Tom said “having a safety net there to help in that moment of need is invaluable”, going on to talk about Caroline’s passion for new technology and developments in spinal cord research.

“We wanted a charity beyond equestrian, which is fighting to make people’s lives better when they have suffered a spinal cord injury,” he said.

Spinal Research has been operating for 40 years and is the UK’s leading charity funding medical research worldwide to develop effective treatments for paralysis caused by a spinal cord injury. Someone in the UK suffers a spinal cord injury every two hours, many of them in car crashes or everyday situations such as falling down the stairs.

Tara Stewart, chair of Spinal Research, said this support “couldn’t have come at a better time” because the charity is finally at the stage where function-restoring therapeutics are being tested in human trials, offering real hope that curing paralysis will be the medical breakthrough of the 21st century.

The support team for Cycle4Caroline includes cycling trainer Sara Symington (double Olympic cyclist and now head of Olympic and Paralympic programmes at British Cycling), physio Ash Wallace, bicycle mechanic Alan Rayner, Sarah Skillin (founder and director of marketing agency EquiConsulting) and Pippie Polson and Piggy’s head girl Amy Phillips, who are leading on logistics, marketing and partnerships.

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