Leslie Law won Britain's first Olympic three-day event gold medal in 32 years at Athens last year, following a dramatic ruling. He talks to Lindsay Jennings about his path to the top, from a council house childhood to his MBE award.

THE call came while he was warming up his ride for the showjumping round of the Solihull horse trials. As Leslie Law answered his mobile phone, his heart began pounding at the thought of a decision finally having been made on whether or not he would be crowned Olympic champion.

It was Yogi Breisner, the British three-day event team manager.

"You're not going to believe this," said Yogi. "But you've got the gold!"

Leslie was utterly speechless. The 40-year-old had spent an agonising three days waiting for the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to rule on whether the individual gold medal for three-day eventing in the 2004 Athens Olympics was rightfully his.

Leslie had initially been awarded a silver medal before it emerged that the German rider Bettina Hoy had made a mistake in her showjumping round by going through the start twice. The decision to award the gold to Leslie meant he became the first rider to win an Olympic gold for Britain in eventing since Richard Meade in 1972. And as the congratulatory messages flowed, it began to dawn on Leslie just how far he had come from his days in a terraced council house.

Leslie grew up in rural Bredwardine, in Herefordshire. He and brother Graham showed an early interest in ponies, galloping around on their friends' until their dad, who dealt in second-hand mobile homes and caravans, managed to save enough for a couple of ponies.

"We were working class but we had a lot of love and freedom as well as discipline," he says.

After school, Leslie was determined to pursue his passion for horses. He got a job riding show horses, point-to-pointers and youngsters at a yard before moving to America aged 18 to bring on young showjumpers.

When he returned to England, he moved to Revel Guest's yard in Herefordshire where he began turning failed showjumpers into eventers.

He was 20 years old and Revel also expected him to attend dinner parties and chat to businessmen about the horses he was bringing on. Feeling completely out of his depth, he would beg Revel to let him go to the pub with his friends. But he soon realised the value of his new social skills.

"Coming from a background where I didn't have any connections with wealthy people, learning to talk to them with reasonable confidence was very important if I wanted to survive in the sport," he admits. "I was never going to have enough money to buy and keep my own horses, so I would have to rely on other people wanting me to ride theirs."

Leslie began competing at various novice trials before progressing to the four star events of Burghley and Badminton. He made 18th position on Welton Apollo at his first Badminton and he started getting some decent horses to ride.

Then during the 1989 season, he met Harriet Harrison, the granddaughter of the late actor Rex Harrison and a keen event rider. The pair married in June 1992 and went on to rent some stables and set up their own yard in Gloucestershire. But it took another three years before he was competing in four star events again, partly due to a couple of nasty injuries.

The first was when Leslie snapped the cruciate ligament in his knee jumping off a haystack. The second came after running into a tree at a novice event when he was knocked unconscious and felt as if he was travelling down a tunnel. He recalls his subconscious telling him to breathe.

"When I asked about it later I was told that they were in a panic because they couldn't get enough oxygen into me. I was definitely on the brink (of death) and it was an extraordinary experience," he says.

Leslie's big chance came with two advanced horses, Capitano and New Flavour. With three promising horses also coming through, he was a regular face at the top three-day events.

But while he focused on the business, his marriage to Harriet collapsed. Leslie's practical, sensible side and Harriet's risk-taking, impulsive nature had pulled them together when they met, but by the winter of 1995, the same characteristics were driving them apart. The couple eventually agreed to divorce and while the eventing world gossiped about the state of their marriage, Leslie focused on his horses and Olympic selection.

To his delight, he was picked for the Atlanta games in 1996, only to see his Olympic dreams crumble when New Flavour was ruled out of the competition due to a bruised sole.

The following year began with a yard full of good horses, but a dark cloud appeared one afternoon on the cross-country course at Gatcombe while riding Capitano.

The horse had felt lacklustre, but Leslie, reasoning they were near the end of the course, pressed on. Just after he had jumped a fence, Capitano suddenly veered off to the left, and collapsed and died.

Leslie was devastated but found he needed all his strength to defend himself against a British Eventing inquiry into whether he had "overpressed a tired horse". The back-biters gathered.

"I suppose people were bound to think the worst," he says. "But what really surprised me was that one or two very influential people in the sport were deliberately canvassing for opinions against me, trying to get others to agree that I had overridden the horse. It was very upsetting, and at times I felt like I didn't want to carry on any more."

Eventually, Leslie was cleared of any blame. But the experience left a bitter taste and, mentally, he found it difficult to ride competitively for a while.

"I was doing something I wanted to enjoy and suddenly the enjoyment was taken out of it for a period of time," he says. "But I took it quiet for a little while, went steady and quietly brought my confidence back up."

Then along came two horses owned by Jeremy Lawton, the brilliant brothers Shear H2O (Solo) and Shear L'Eau (Stan) whom Leslie had discovered as youngsters.

In 2000, Leslie got the chance to compete in the Sydney Olympics and performed one of his best ever dressage scores on Solo, going on to win the silver team medal with Ian Stark, Pippa Funnell and Jeanette Brakewell. He also had a new woman in his life - Trina Lightwood - who was by his side constantly, helping to keep the horses in tiptop condition.

The couple bought a run-down dairy farm at Naunton, near Worcester, and began to convert the milking parlour and barn into a successful yard. Then came the call for the Athens Olympics last year. This time he took Stan, and after working on his dressage for months, the pair produced a polished, fault-free performance. The cross country section went relatively smoothly, although he picked up 1.20 time penalties, but it was after the showjumping on the third day that the controversy began.

The British team had won a bronze medal and when the individual showjumping came around, Leslie was lying in 11th position. He jumped a fantastic clear round to be boosted to 5th position and watched as the top four riders made mistake after mistake, meaning he moved up to silver. Only Bettina Hoy was ahead of him, but it then emerged she had crossed the start twice. Penalty points for such an error should have downgraded her, but the Appeals Committee ruled that Bettina's gold medal victory was valid.

The ruling was eventually overturned by the CAS. Leslie got the individual gold and a silver team medal. Looking back, he says he is not bitter at missing out on the pomp and ceremony of receiving his golden medal while the National Anthem played.

"I don't really believe in bitterness, I think life is too short for that," he says philosophically. "You take what you can at the time and just enjoy it."

The gold has given him huge satisfaction after working so hard to excel in the sport. He was also honoured to be awarded the MBE in the New Year's Honours List.

But there is plenty more to achieve. He still has those impressive grey brothers and more talented horses coming through to help him in his bid for the elusive Badminton crown.

"At least Badminton comes around every year," he laughs. "So I don't have to wait four years for it to come around. Then there's the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I would love nothing more than to go there and defend the title."

* Shear Gold by Leslie Law with Gillian Newsum (Methuen Publishing, £15.99).