1959 -

After Australia’s equestrian team won the three-day event at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, crowd members were chanting: “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Hoy, Hoy, Hoy.” They were congratulating all four members of the team, but this variation on the normal cry was a salute to Andrew Hoy, who had just become the first Australian other than Dawn Fraser to win three gold medals in a row. Afterwards, alongside team-mates Phillip Dutton, Matt Ryan and Stuart Tinney, Hoy said: “One thing that’s contributed to my riding was that I grew up on a farm and was chasing sheep and cattle around a paddock.” Hoy, now a veteran of six Olympics, came from Culcairn, NSW, and was competing on horseback at the age of seven, with a horse borrowed from his uncle. A member of the Australian teams at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, he won his first gold in the 1992 Barcelona three-day team event, in company with Matt Ryan and Gillian Rolton.

In Atlanta in 1996, after carrying the Australian flag in the Opening Ceremony, Hoy was a member of the team (with Dutton, Rolton and Wendy Schaeffer) that won back-to-back gold in the three-day event. In Sydney in 2000 the Australians rode superbly in every phase, and led all the way to win. Hoy’s wife Bettina, whom he met at the 1984 Games and married in 2001, has competed for Germany in equestrian events at four Olympics. In Athens she was awarded the gold medal in the individual three-day event, but was later stripped of it on appeal. Hoy himself, did not medal at these Games.

Harry Gordon, AOC historian