Tommy Brennan was a member of the Irish three-day eventing team that finished 4th at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games – the highest placing ever achieved by an Irish team in the Olympic three-day event – and went on to ride in the Irish team that won the inaugural World Three-Day Eventing Championship at Burghley in 1966, the greatest achievement in the history of Irish equestrian sport.

From Dunnamaggin, Co. Kilkenny, Brennan began hunting with the Kilmoganny Harriers as a boy and joined the pony club at Mount Juliet – organised by the McCalmont family, one of the first in Ireland to do so – where young riders had the privilege of watching recordings of their performances.

He rode ponies for local farmers from the age of six and won gymkhana events as a nine-year-old. After school, he completed a Macra na Feirme course in animal husbandry and worked the family farm. He won the first of nine RDS jumping championships in 1956, later recruited by cattle exporter Omar van Landeghem as trainer and rider at his Skidoo Stud in Dublin. The Dublin 1964 Aga Khan Trophy success on Kilkenny – a horse making its debut in the three-day event in Tokyo – preceded the Olympic competition.

The team, described by Brennan as ‘a fabulous team of three young riders and the veteran Harry Freeman-Jackson’, was trained by Brigadier Lyndon Bolton on a fifty-seven hour adventure flight that included a brake-pipe burst landing at Anchorage and a twelve-hour delay awaiting spare parts from Seattle.

In Tokyo, Brennan jumped a clear round in the endurance test and was part of the only team to jump three clear rounds in the show jumping phase.