Royals and horses: The injuries, broken bones and falls
The royal family has a lifelong love of horses, with the Princess Royal competing at eventing in the Olympics and Zara Tindall winning a silver medal in London 2012.
Anne learnt to ride as a young child, with her mother the late Queen passing on her fascination with all things equestrian, and her father Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, and brother the King both skilled horsemen and polo players.
But the Windsors’ close connection with horses has led to injuries in the past – mostly while riding, unlike Anne who was said to have been walking on her estate when she suffered concussion and minor injuries, consistent with impact from a horse’s head or legs.
Anne had several falls while competing as a showjumper.
In 1976, she was knocked unconscious and cracked a vertebra when she was thrown from her mother’s horse Candlewick while competing in the Portman Horse Trials in Dorset.
She suffered concussion and later said she could remember nothing about the incident.
Her daughter Zara was knocked unconscious when she fell from her horse in 2004 when she was competing in horse trials at Lulworth in Dorset and the animal, Ardfield Magic Star, started playing up, with both falling on their heads.
She was taken to hospital as a precaution and x-rayed, and later driven home by Anne.
Charles, as the Prince of Wales, has suffered the most horse-related injuries over the years.
He needed six stitches and was left with a two-inch scar on his face after being thrown and kicked by his polo pony in 1980.
On another occasion, he was hit in the throat, causing him to lose his voice for 10 days.
He broke his right arm in 1990 in a fall during a polo match and broke a rib when he tumbled from his horse in a hunting accident in 1998.
Charles also fractured a small bone in his shoulder after falling off his horse during a fox hunt in June 2001.
A few months later in August 2001, he was knocked unconscious when his horse threw him from its back during a polo match.
The prince swallowed his tongue after landing awkwardly on the grass at Cirencester Polo Club after a goalmouth skirmish in the charity game.
He was stretchered off and taken by ambulance to hospital as a precautionary measure.
In January 1994, the late Queen broke her wrist in a riding fall – but climbed back on her horse and rode home unaware she had suffered anything more than a bruise.
She suffered the fracture to her left wrist as she thrust her arm out when she fell riding on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
The same year she was treated in hospital after a horse kicked grit into her eye as she rode in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
The Queen is thought to have been in some discomfort before a doctor cleaned the eye out at the King Edward VII’s Hospital.
The Duke of Sussex – a keen polo player – was chucked off his pony during the first chukka of a charity match in New York in 2010 but dusted himself off unscathed and remounted.
