When Alice Plunkett was given a day riding out for trainer Roddy Armytage for her 16th birthday, she turned up at his Berkshire yard dressed in her hunting gear complete with a Patey. “I remember feeling really uncool,” Plunkett tells me when we meet in the Dorset village where she lives with her Olympic eventer husband William Fox-Pitt and their four children. “But the thing that absolutely grabbed me was the power of these horses and the buzz of the yard.”

Now in her fifties, Plunkett has been immersed in this world for three decades. Every Saturday from October to April she presents ITV Racing’s coverage, hotfooting it from the West Country on a Friday night to hole up in a hotel close to the course before an eye-wateringly early start. Watch her in the paddock and there’s something captivating about her intimacy with it all: legging-up jockeys as she’s interviewing them; putting her arm around winning owners, tears often brewing.

Growing up with her two sisters in Heythrop country, where her mother Celia was a Joint Master, Plunkett was hunting four days a week when she could – the morning of her wedding in 2003 was no exception. Then there was the Pony Club and team-chasing. “I couldn’t ride a bike, I couldn’t ski, I couldn’t do anything else really,” she says, reminiscing about a childhood that culminated in her representing Britain at the Eventing European Championship for Young Riders.

On her gap year she began pointing, riding Bold King’s Hussar whom her grandfather had bred and left notes for when he died saying that he could see the gelding’s white face landing over Becher’s Brook. When Plunkett won the Ladies’ Open at the Beaufort point-to-point it qualified her for the Foxhunters’ over the Grand National fences. And so aged 19 she set off for Aintree, finishing in the middle of the pack with a National Velvet-esque thrill. Next came the University of Bristol and then the offer of a job in Paris with the Racing Post. However, when her sister Katie was diagnosed with leukaemia aged 16 and died less than two months later, Plunkett wanted to be at home. She threw herself into eventing, her eyes on the four-stars. Plunkett did eventually ride around Badminton in 2000 (“a real pinch-me moment”) but an unexpected break came earlier at Blenheim when she was being followed by a camera crew for a documentary. “It was perfect TV because I led the dressage, and then fell in the water. The producer said that I’d come across well if I ever wanted to do more broadcasting.”

So began stints with Fox FM reporting at Blenheim, and then for Festival Radio at Cheltenham. Later came a job with the Racing Channel, juggling it with 5am starts exercising her eventers. “I was warming up at Gatcombe and my phone rang. It was my boss asking where I was because I was due at Hereford. I don’t know why he didn’t sack me. But I remember Clare Balding saying: ‘You need to focus. You can’t do both of these things.’” By the time she was 28, Plunkett had stopped eventing and landed a job with Channel 4 Racing, alongside Lord Oaksey, John Francome and Jim McGrath. “The impostor syndrome was off the scale. All those people were heroes,” she admits.

The biggest change she’s seen during her career, she reflects, is that we’re no longer talking about Bryony Frost or Rachael Blackmore as ‘the first women’ to win racing’s biggest spoils. “They’re just really good at what they do. If I’d said to Rachael at the top of the hill at Cheltenham in 2022 ‘You’re the first woman to win the Gold Cup’, she’d have been furious. For her, that wasn’t the defining thing.” Then there’s the threat to hunting’s future: “It’s a political hot potato because racing is already in the spotlight. But what happens to hunting has a knock-on effect on racing, for sure.”

By the time racing coverage moved to ITV in 2017 and she had to reapply for her job, Plunkett and Fox-Pitt had four children. She told the producers that she was a mother, a wife and then a broadcaster – in that order. She got the job. Did she ever question the sanity of the juggle? “Definitely, it’s a crazy balance. But William’s always been really supportive, and it’s also always been clear that I needed to keep my own identity. I don’t mean that in a chippy way but by the time we got together, he’d already won Burghley and was established.

“People are funny around him; he’s a hero for them. So, to keep my sanity, I needed my own thing,” she says. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t been at her husband’s side, riding the roller coaster of eventing: from his haul of Olympic medals to the crashing lows, none worse than a fall in 2015 that left him in a coma for eight days. But Plunkett is resolutely stoic. With nearly all of her children she was back at work within two weeks of giving birth. “I remember a female producer found me in the car at Kempton sobbing after I’d had our third, and another time begging to go into the weighing room at Cheltenham to express milk. When I look back, I think I could have managed it differently but I never had the confidence to take time,” she reveals.

Anyhow, pressing pause doesn’t seem part of her repertoire. She now trails the country pony racing with one daughter and to county fairs to show sheep with another, taking the odd breather on the banks of the Stour with her fishing-mad son. There’s the charity she heads up in memory of Katie and her other sister Eloise, who also died of cancer in 2002, and the Larmer Tree Project that brings the creative arts to rural children. And then there’s her and Fox-Pitt’s appointment as presidents of the Royal Bath & West Show. “There’ll be a time when it won’t be this busy,” she concedes. “But I’d rather die of exhaustion than of boredom.”

Photograph: Millie Pilkington

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