October 16, 2024 
Earlier this month, word broke that the 10-year-old Westphalian gelding, Zineday, former ride of Germany’s Philipp Weishaupt, had been sold to the USA’s Eve Jobs.
Headline-stealing horse sales are par for the course in show jumping (see: Darry Lou and Fibonacci), but this one feels particularly prescient. Although he’s young by international show jumping standards, Zineday has already amassed a list of accomplishments to rival horses many years his senior.
Some of these include the gelding’s 3rd place podium finish in the Rolex Grand Prix at CHIO Aachen at just nine years old. Another is his individual silver medal at the 2023 FEI European Championship, and his lucrative GCL Super Cup victory in Prague with Riesenbeck International that same year.
Most notably, this summer in Paris, Zineday wowed in his Olympic Games debut, notching back-to-back clear rounds for the German team. With 14 proving to be a prime Olympic age for many top-performing mounts (think: King Edward, Legacy, and Individual Champion Checker 47)—four years from now for Zineday—it’s likely that the gelding’s status as a proven entity for the 2028 Los Angeles Games played a key role in his appeal.
And then there are his numbers.
According to Jumpr, Zineday is currently the highest-earning 10-year-old horse at the top level (i.e. *5 1.60m+ competition) pocketing nearly €953,000 in prize money in the last 365 days. That’s just part of Zineday’s cool €1,193,107 career earnings—and it’s cash he comes by honestly.
Although the gelding sits in second place to Belgian rider Gilles Thomas’s Ermitage Kalone for clear round percentages—68% compared to Ermitage’s 75%—he and Weishaupt have competed more than three times the number of rounds as Thomas and Ermitage.
In fact, with a major victory already on his resume in that €6.5 million GCL Super Cup Final, Zineday joins an elite list of only nine, 10-year-old horses in history—among them Tiffany Foster’s (CAN) Electrique, Lillie Keenan’s (USA) Kick On, and Christian Kukuk’s (GER) Just Be Gentle—to earn a *5, 1.60m grand prix win. Only Kent Farrington and Greya of the USA and Richard Vogel and Cepano Baloubet of Germany have won two *5s a piece as 10-year-olds.
What’s more, in their three years together, Zineday and Weishaupt achieved a 71% clear round rate in 24 rounds together at 1.60m, finishing in the top 10 at the same, astounding percentage.
For her part, Zineday’s new owner, Eve Jobs, hasn’t competed a 1.60m class since 2021. At just 26 years of age, Jobs’s most successful partnership has been with the now-19-year-old SBS mare, Venue D’Fees Des Hazelles, with whom she jumped clear at 39% at 38 rounds at 1.60m. The pair also finished fourth individually at the 2019 Pan American Games, and took 2nd place in the LGCT Grand Prix of Hamburg in 2021.
Could Zineday fulfill the prophesy as Jobs’s next, big, international—and potentially Olympic—star? Only time will tell. But one thing is for certain: America has gained a good one.
