Gabby Logan's daughter Lois: ‘I've never had anything handed to me'

Telegraph

2 days ago

There's an imposter on the gallops at Park House Stables, Kingsclere, the Berkshire racing yard of Andrew Balding. Wearing a bright yellow silk on her riding hat, Lois Logan, the 19-year-old daughter of forthcoming Match of the Day presenter Gabby and her husband, Kenny, is thundering around the track on a race-fit thoroughbred. Yet Lois is a showjumper who only sat on a racehorse for the first time this spring.
'She's been amazing,' Balding's wife, Anna Lisa, tells me as we watch the horses exercise against the backdrop of the sun-scorched north Hampshire Downs. 'To be safe to race involves hard work in the gym and on the horse.'
Indeed, to my untrained eye, Lois's riding position is no different from the professionals. 'It's such an adrenalin rush,' she says as she untacks her horse and washes it down. 'These horses are totally different athletes to mine – they're F1 cars not Range Rover Sports. It's the quickest I've gone in my life.'
This week, Lois, who is studying geography at Loughborough University, will be riding in the Markel Magnolia Cup – an invitation-only charity race – at the Qatar Goodwood Festival. The event has raised more than £2.7m for good causes since the first race in 2011.
She is one of 12 amateur female jockeys who have spent the past few months training at top yards. Park House Stables is where Queen Elizabeth II once kept her racehorses, and is run like a military operation, with 90 staff and 250 horses in training.
Gabby warned Lois that it would be tough to fit in training with university, but Lois was determined. 'No time is going to be the right time,' she says.
In a relatively short period of time, she has passed a gruelling jockey fitness test, and learnt to ride like a jockey, in a forward leaning crouch above the saddle to minimise wind resistance and maximise control of the horse.
'I've hit the deck once – the horse was going beautifully and from nowhere he slammed on the brakes,' she says. 'I somersaulted over his head and landed on my bum. I was so embarrassed. I just wanted to get back on.'
Arguably in contrast to your average teenager, Lois radiates enthusiasm, and can count the number of times she has had a hangover on one hand. 'I've had a couple,' she admits. 'In freshers' week I had one so bad I called my mum and she said, 'You're hungover, welcome to university.''
An early riser, today Lois has been up since 5am, riding a pony she's training to sell – her father came out to help her – before driving 90 minutes to Kingsclere to take two horses around the gallops in the heat.
Later this afternoon, she will drive back home to Buckinghamshire to ride her showjumpers and train at the gym. She's kept to a strict diet, with advice from the British Racing School's nutritionists, to ensure she eats enough protein and carbohydrates.
Tomorrow she will do it all again. 'I hate waking up past 8am, because it feels like my whole day is gone. I think it comes from my mum and dad,' she says. 'My mum has a day off and spends three hours scrubbing the kitchen floor.'
Despite this being her first major interview, Lois, who has appeared on her mother's podcast, The Mid Point – which focuses on midlife challenges and expectations – insists her parents haven't coached her about what to say.
'They trust me to say the right thing,' she says. 'I've seen them in their environments their whole life – I'm not fussed by it.' Gabby's new job presenting Match of the Day has been a proud moment for the family, says Lois, and is totally deserved, as her mother never stops working. 'Sometimes I'll be scrolling Instagram and I'll be like, 'Oh, she's doing that'. She's so busy the whole time.'
We are chatting in the 'colour room', a converted barn with walls hung with winning jockey silks. Anna Lisa, who takes all Magnolia Cup entrants under her wing, has left us with a basket of croissants and sausage rolls that she baked this morning.
Gabby came here to watch her daughter train a few weeks ago and was so impressed by Park House Stables that she featured them on her other podcast, co-hosted by Mark Chapman, The Sports Agents.
'It blew her brains,' Lois says. 'Even though she isn't horsey, her grandfather was a bookie and she dreamt of being a racehorse trainer when she was younger.'
Was Gabby's heart in her throat watching her daughter tear the gallops? 'She's more nervous watching me jump,' Lois says. 'She has to stand at least 10m from my dad because she jumps every jump with me.'
The Logans must be one of the sportiest families in Britain. Gabby is the daughter of Welsh former football player and manager Terry Yorath, and before becoming a television presenter she was a rhythmic gymnast, representing Wales in the 1990 Commonwealth Games. Meanwhile Lois's father, Kenny, is a former Scotland international rugby union player who now runs his own sports marketing company.
There was never a question that their offspring would play sport – Lois has a twin brother, Reuben, a professional rugby union player for Northampton Saints – although Lois insists that they always did so willingly (with one possible exception during lockdown when Gabby made them exercise for six hours straight to raise money for charity).
'There is this assumption that Mum and Dad are pushy, but they're not,' says Lois. 'They just wanted us to enjoy sport. For them, it's about mental health and release and keeping yourself fit and happy.'
She reels off all the sports that she played competitively as a child: swimming, tennis, lacrosse, netball. Oh, and she could have become a professional athlete. 'I had to choose between high jump or showjumping and, weirdly, at university, I've picked up pole vault,' says Lois. Her boyfriend is the South African golfer Cam Raubenheimer; they met at school.
The family are all extremely competitive with each other; a game of rounders quickly becomes serious, Lois explains, and there's a healthy amount of mother-daughter rivalry.
'Mum and I ran a half marathon together last year. She took it really seriously and trained very hard, and I didn't,' says Lois. 'We got to the 12th mile and I was like, 'Mum, I didn't train hard enough for this', and she said, 'You're staying with me'.
'Then we got 400m from the finish line and I tried to sprint off and beat her and she was like, 'Don't you dare, because I've got nothing left.' We finished holding hands.'
It was Kenny's family who introduced Lois to riding. He grew up with horses on his family's farm in Scotland, and Kenny's mother, a former three-day eventer, was the instigator.
At the time, the Logans lived in London, where Lois had to make do with a rocking horse. But at the age of seven, when the family moved to Buckinghamshire, she started having riding lessons.
'It was free childcare for Mum and Dad. They'd drop me at the yard and I'd be there from 9am till 3pm doing chores, scrubbing buckets or filling hay nets, in the hope that I might get a ride if I was lucky,' Lois recalls.
'They'd never drop me off with a lunchbox or water. I'd literally have to fend for myself,' she continues. 'At the start, Mum quite liked the idea of me being horsey. I don't think she knew what I was getting myself into.'
Inevitably, Lois's equine passion spiralled. First, she had a loan pony at a local showjumping yard, and then her own pony, Aero. Lois describes Aero as being 'an absolute nut job' who became a winning machine once she got the hang of him.
'I was about eight when I got him and I had no brakes,' she says. 'The first time I jumped him, I fell off and cried. I thought I wasn't going to be allowed to jump him again.'
She was a gutsy competitor, with Kenny as her chief groom, driving the horsebox to shows. 'He's learnt along the way with me. He's a proper horseman and amazing with animals,' says Lois.
At 16, with a new pony, Oreo Patches, she won two classes at the 2021 British Showjumping National Championships and qualified for the Horse of the Year Show. Now, Lois is moving up the ranks on her horse Jet Stream. 'I'd love to ride in the Olympics, but at this point it seems far off,' she says.
Jet Stream is not, however, what horsey people would describe as a 'push button pony' (one that knows exactly what is being asked of it). Lois says she has never been bought a highly trained horse with a proven track record, although people often see her surname and assume otherwise.
'I've never had anything handed to me,' says Lois. 'I'm lucky that my parents have always supported me, but with showjumping, unless you come from a showjumping dynasty – like the Whitaker family – or from obscene wealth, it's really tough. I don't come from either of those backgrounds.'
Even if Lois's parents could have afforded to buy her an Olympic horse, she doubts they would have done so. They've given their twins 'an unbelievable set of morals to stand on', she says, and have made them work for everything.
Gabby was, she says, the last mother in their year to hand out mobile phones, when they were 13. 'Even when we got them, we were only allowed an hour of screen time a day, on the bus home from school,' she says. 'I think we despised her for a couple of years, but both Reuben and I would do the same,' she adds. 'Social media is such a toxic place for young people.'
During Lois's final year at school, when she began to discuss a gap year with her parents, they made it clear that they would not finance her dream of competing in the Sunshine Tour, a five-week annual championship series in Spain. 'I started thinking about fundraising strategies and, in the end, I bought a pony on Facebook. Anything could have turned up on the lorry – a goat! – but luckily he was a lovely pony.'
She 'produced' him (equestrian speak for training him to a higher level) and the profit from his sale funded her gap year, paying for her travel to Spain and all the shows. She admits, though, that the luck didn't hold: another pony she bought turned out to have sarcoids (warts), which slashed his value.
'You're never guaranteed to make money with horses,' says Lois. If someone offered her big bucks for her Olympic hopeful, a young horse she has been producing for several years, she says she'd have no choice but to take it.
'With horses, you've got to be prepared to sacrifice certain things to keep the rest of it going,' she says. 'Every time you train [a horse], it costs a certain amount of money. It's like having a child: you've got to think about feed, dentist, vet bills, vaccinations.'
She says there is a racy, Jilly Cooper side to showjumping, which she confirms is still alive and kicking. 'There's a bit of naughtiness in all equestrian sports,' she admits. 'Showjumping is so glamorous, with its boots and white jodhpurs and show jackets. There's a big fashion side to it.
'When I was younger I was desperate for a Cavalleria Toscana [a premium range of Italian equestrian clothing] jacket, but my mum wouldn't let me have one,' says Lois. Much to her excitement, the jockey silks she'll be wearing at the Magnolia Cup have been designed by her favourite fashion brand, Rixo.
On occasion, Anna Lisa admits she feels nervous for her Magnolia Cup protégées, but not Lois. By Goodwood, she will be truly ready to race. 'She's put in the hours and is beginning to look rather good,' says Anna Lisa.
Lois's non-horsey university friends, however, think it's all a bit crazy. She'll have ridden two horses before they've even got out of bed. This summer, she's hoping to take her truck licence, enabling her to drive a large horse lorry, so she won't have to rely on her father.
For the time being, though, her focus is on the finishing line at Goodwood. 'I'm the fittest I've ever been,' she says. 'I know there's a risk – the speed is insane – but you can't go about life being scared.'