When asked if he could go back in time and give the younger version of himself one piece of advice, eight-time World Equestrian Brands USEA Rider of the Year Boyd Martin says he wouldn’t change a thing.

“I think the decade I spent in Australia, slogging away with rough and ready horses and working like a dog, learning off Heath Ryan, who was my mentor as a kid, built me into who I am today,” he reflected.

“I left home when I was very young. At 17, I left school and became a working student, and at the beginning, it was not very glamorous,” he continued. “I think the thousands and thousands of hours of work that I put in while in Australia actually makes me appreciate my time here in America. It was a blessing, in a weird kind of way, to get started on my career in Australia. At the time, there was not much money in it, the quality of the horses was pretty low, and the events were a bit rustic, but in saying all of that, I learned to be a really, really good horseman.”

In 2007, Martin and his wife, international dressage rider Silva Martin, relocated to the United States where he came under the wing of Olympian Phillip Dutton, a move Boyd called a “huge turning point in his career.”

Since then, the Martins and their operation have undergone their fair share of ups and downs—from overcoming tragedy to building up their own home base at Windurra USA in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, and now raising a family. Through it all, Boyd credits the hard times for all of his successes along the way.

“In my career now, I am just desperate to ride the best of the best horses, but somewhere along the way, you’re going to get to a five-star, and it’s going to be pouring rain and muddy, and you’re going to lose your reins—things are always going to go terribly wrong. And I think at some point in your life, you have to learn how to grit through those things. When you look at, who I probably think is one of the greatest riders in American eventing, Phillip Dutton, whenever the going gets tough, you watch him ride cross-country even at the age of 60 now, and it’s just remarkable. And while I think that is something that is inside of him, I also think that is learned behavior picked up over decades and decades of riding imperfect horses in imperfect conditions. That is how champions are made.”

Boyd himself was raised by two Olympians so he was no stranger to the concept of becoming a champion. His father, Ross Martin, was an Olympic cross-country skier, and his mother, Toy Martin, represented America in the Olympics as a speed skater. Despite his parent’s high-performance successes, however, his dad made a conscious effort not to place that pressure on Boyd as a young athlete—a parenting maneuver that Boyd has adopted himself for his three sons, Nox, Leo, and Koa.

Read the rest of Meagan DeLisle’s story here.