May 24, 2022 
The formula for picking draft picks on a Fantasy Sports Team is skill + opportunity = success.
It’s the same one Egyptian Olympian Nayel Nassar uses to guide his sports career.
And it’s no coincidence. Nassar is a show jumper by trade—and a fantasy basketball fanatic by leisure. When he isn’t in the saddle, training his enviable string of horses or competing in 5* events around the globe, you’ll likely find him on his phone catching the latest basketball game, tracking player stats and obsessing over data trends.
“I do pretty well,” he smiled, of his Fantasy League team. “I take it very seriously. For the amount of money I have invested in it, I definitely invest more time in it than I should.”
Fantasy sports are wildly popular and, with the growth of the internet, widely accessible. Nassar picked up the hobby while studying at Stanford University. At the time, it was meant to be a bit of fun between friends for a modest payout. It ended up, the spark for his newest business venture.
In 2013, Nassar’s undergraduate career was coming to a close just as his riding career started taking off. A few months before graduating, he won the HITS Million for the first of what would be three times in his career (to date). With show jumping looking like an increasingly viable career option for the rising star came questions about where he’d find the horses upon which to build it.
“As I was getting closer and closer to the top level of the sport, I started to get curious about other horses jumping that level that maybe I hadn’t caught wind of because they weren’t going to big shows. And I simply had no way of going about that search,” he explains.
Nassar asked his roommates, “computer-science guys,” what it would take to build a fully filterable engine for show jumping performance records. “They were shocked that something like that didn’t exist for our sport because of the data driven trajectory other sports were on,” he said.
“Show jumping is a sport that is deeply set in its tradition. Even as the sport becomes increasingly modern—with faster horses, lighter materials and better broadcasting and access—the technology used to look up and follow international show jumping remains seriously outdated.”
Fast forward seven years and his idea remained just that, an idea. Then the pandemic hit.
When the international show jumping calendar was put on pause in 2020, Nassar found his window to pursue the analytics idea that’d been floating around the back of his mind since Uni. A mutual friend from Stanford connected him with Minhee Lee, an app developer at Amazon. Combining Lee’s coding acumen and Nassar’s understanding of the sport, the pair started working on a user-friendly app that would compile and filter show jumping results data.
“With basketball, it’s so seamless to be able to figure out who the good players are that really thrive in a certain category. You have all these splits for player performance data, depending on whether they’re at home or on the road, which teams they’re playing against, which position they’re being guarded by. There was just so much detailed information that you can get on these players,” says Nassar.
“We wanted to create the same thing for equestrian sport.”
Two years later their COVID baby, JUMPR App, was born.
JUMPR pulls data from multiple sources and is updated daily to give a real-time snapshot of a horse’s record. It’s designed primarily for riders, trainers, and owners with horses competing at FEI level as a tool to assess and track a horse’s performance, in just a few clicks.
Like the query that inspired it, JUMPR is meant to be a horse sales tool as well, offering a layer of transparency in the sales pipeline that has been lacking in horse sport, said Nassar.
“With JUMPR, it’s very easy to get a very clear picture of where the horse performs well, what height it’s the most competitive and therefore have a much stronger understanding of the horse that they’re either buying or selling,” said the world No. 27.
“And, it gives you a benchmark to compare horses if you’re between two choices. That is pretty powerful.”
Nassar focuses on three metrics when assessing a horse: clear round rate, competitiveness (placement percentages), and four faults or less rate.
“I’m looking at consistency and high level performance. So I’m looking at the height the horse competes at and how often it jumps clear at that height. And I’m also looking at how often it’s in the top 10 because that gives me an indication of how competitive that horse is,” said Nassar, noting that all those analytics can be filtered on JUMPR.
“I also look at the horse’s four faults or less rate. I think it’s a good metric for a horse’s consistency. If the horse doesn’t jump clear all the time or doesn’t jump clear as much as it should, but it almost never has more than one fence down, that gives me an idea that maybe the rider and horse aren’t a great match. Maybe the horse needs one little tweak in its program and its clear round rate might go up.”
The same data can even be used to help you find your next horse. Simply customize your search with the specific criteria you are looking for in your next partner, said Nassar.
Beyond the niche industry applications, JUMPR is laying the bricks for a more enriched fan experience, much like its NBA Fantasy League predecessor. Data and statistics are a universal language that opens equestrian sport to a wider fan base, particularly among the younger generation. You don’t have to know horses to understand stats.
“We’re also trying to cater to the casual show jumping fan who is trying to keep track of the seemingly endless show calendar and want to know when their favorite riders and horses are jumping and when they post new results,” he explained.
That data will be increasingly in demand with the rise of fantasy sports in the equestrian space. Two new fantasy jumping platforms launched in 2022—Prixview, created by fellow Stanford alum and Olympian Lucy Davis (USA), and JumpClear, an app Nassar is also invested in. Both provide a direct, and until now missing, link between fans and horse sport.
“[With Fantasy Leagues] you get fully invested in the player’s performance because you feel like they’re now playing for you. So, it’s fun. It just adds another layer of excitement, and I feel like it keeps you plugged in to what you’re watching because you are invested yourself,” said Nassar.
The big question now—and bigger challenge—is whether data will be adopted by the notoriously tradition-obsessed equestrian industry. Nassar says a data-driven approach will never replace the innate instinct of a horseman in the purchasing process or team selection. And it’s not meant to. But it could inform the process.
“It took a little while for [professional sports] teams or for general managers to look at performance through the eyes of data. But there’s no denying that it’s been hugely adopted,” he said. “Many teams make a lot of their personnel decisions based purely off of the statistics and data now. So, I think it’s a fine balance. I definitely think the older generation would take a little longer to adopt that sort of methodology. But, you know, it’s pretty clear that all sports have really taken that approach nowadays.
“It’s finding that balance between using your eye and going with what’s on paper and what the numbers are telling you.”
Step one, of course, is downloading the app.
This story is brought to you by Thunderbird Show Park, home of Major League Show Jumping and the Longines FEI Jumping Nations Cup™ of Canada.
