(Photograph) - Pat Smythe, the international showjumping champion who died this week aged 67, leaves her bestselling pony books for children on countless school library shelves. Her Three Jays series, written in her mid-twenties to help fund her showjumping career, mixed fact and fiction. Smythe herself - the first woman showjumper to compete at the Olympics in 1956 (above, on Flanagan) - starred as the narrator. Her stables at Bath Miserden provided the setting for the horse-mad children in six Jays adventures, now all out of print.