Every major championship needs a feel-good story.
For show jumping fans, the story of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games might well be the much-buzzed-about partnership between Belgium’s Gilles Thomas and the 10-year-old Selle Français stallion, Ermitage Kalone.
In a sport where success follows top horses, and top horses are increasingly within the purview of those with the largest pocketbooks, home-grown success is hard to come by.
Yet in his short 26 years, Thomas—called “the best up-and-coming rider in the world today” by none other than Australian Olympian Edwina Tops-Alexander—has earned plenty of chops.
In 2022, he helped the Belgian team to victory in the Longines FEI Nations Cup Final in Barcelona with Calleryama. This May, he won the LGCT Grand Prix of Shanghai aboard Luna van het Dennehof. And Thomas, who competed in his first Junior Europeans for Belgium at the tender age of 13, has come up in the sport the old-fashioned way.
A rider for his uncle Marc Van Dijck’s Stal Nieuwenhof in Northern Belgium, Thomas got the ride on the Ermitage Kalone when the horse was a 6-year-old.
The stallion was discovered by Van Dijck’s nephew, Joris Van Dijck, in a printed French sales catalog before he was even two—despite the fact that the majority of top sales listings, then as now, are found online. By the time they’d free-jumped Ermitage as a three-year-old, the men knew they had something special.
And, in the seven years since, he has proved to be all they had hoped for—and more.
Last year, Thomas and Ermitage won the Belgian Championship for Seniors in Lanaken in September, launching them into the international spotlight. In early May, the pair made their Global Champions League (GCL) debut for Valkenswaard United, earning a win for the team alongside Great Britain’s John Whitaker.
Even more impressive is the fact that they’ve done it on their own timeframe.
As an active breeding stallion, the flashy chestnut is required to adhere to a different schedule than many of his fellow competitors, taking time off throughout the season to fulfill his breeding duties for Stal Nieuwenhof.
Fortunately, when it’s time to get back to work in the show ring, Ermitage rarely misses a beat.
“He had to breed a lot, that’s why he didn’t do so many shows,” Thomas told ClipMyHorse.TV. “But his mind is so good, he actually doesn’t need to do so many shows to be in good shape.
“He’s a clever horse. He learns really fast.”
Indeed he does. Watching the effortlessly smooth Thomas and Ermitage in action, it sometimes appears that they are executing a junior equitation callback, not a timed, 1.50+ track. (Unsurprisingly, Thomas considers Marcus Ehning’s riding style to be one of his biggest inspirations.)
And the higher Ermitage Kalone jumps, the more his quality becomes evident.
Just this May, the pair made the podium in their first CSI5* 1.60m Grand Prix, taking third at LGCT Madrid. One month later, they jumped 0/0 for Belgium, helping the team to a fourth place finish in the Longines League of Nations Rotterdam. Two days after that, Thomas and Ermitage earned a fifth place finish in the CSIO5* Grand Prix.
According to Jumpr, the pair jump clear at 57% in seven rounds at 1.55m, also finishing in the top 10 57% of the time. In their four rounds together at the championship height of 1.60m, those numbers increase to 75% clear, finishing in the top 10 100% of the time.
At both levels, the stallion averages less than a single fault a round.
Unproven though they still may be at the very top of the sport, it appears Belgian Chef d’Equipe Peter Weinberg saw what he needed to see, selecting them for the Paris Olympic Games next month.
They’ve barely scratched the surface, but could Gilles Thomas and Ermitage Kalone be the next big thing in international show jumping? The sport’s heavy hitters seem to be throwing their weight behind them, and it won’t be long until we know.