February 11, 2025 
Ten years ago, when Duarte Seabra was flying around cross-country courses at Lexington and Badminton, he couldn’t conceive of doing anything else.
Flash forward and the Portuguese rider has two, U.S.-based World Equestrian Games (WEG) appearances on his resume. The first was in eventing at Lexington, Kentucky in 2010 with Fernhill Closter Rebel. The second, in show jumping, in Tryon, North Carolina in 2018 with SIG Winter Soldier.
Under different circumstances, that second WEG might not have happened.
“I never thought one day I’d become a show jumper,” Seabra, 39, told Horse & Hound last August. “If you asked me when I was eventing, I would have said, ‘Not even in my dreams.’”
That was until tragedy struck Seabra’s family in 2015. That year, his brother, fellow eventer Francisco Seabra, was tragically killed while competing on cross country at a CIC 2* event in Sevilla, Spain. Francisco had made his own senior championship debut at the WEG in Caen just one year before.
The loss marked a turning point for Duarte, who made the switch to show jumping in 2015. He hasn’t looked back since.
Today, Seabra is not yet a top player at the five-star level. But he’s accrued an impressive string of results in the last two years, culminating with his individual Olympic debut in Paris with Dourados 2.
And if Seabra’s New Year’s resolution was to “make a splash in 2025!” (we’re just guessing), he’s certainly making it stick.
On January 25, Duarte and Dourados 2—a 12-year-old Westphalian gelding and former Cian O’Connor (IRL) ride—placed third on the podium in the 1.60m 5* Grand Prix at Al Shaqab in Doha. One week earlier, they took the second of two, career 1.55m wins in the 4* Grand Prix at the same venue.
Those placings, and others, earned Seabra more than €162,000 in January, alone, according to Jumpr stats—enough to make him the highest-earning rider in the world in the first month of 2025.
His competition? A who’s-who of top names including Kent Farrington (USA), Julien Epaillard (FRA), and even the World No. 1, Henrik von Eckermann.
Those three, alone, are regular fixtures on the Longines Rankings’ top 10 list. Which makes Seabra’s feat especially impressive when you consider that he jumped more than 80 ranking places—from No. 212 to No. 130—in the same month’s time.
And while the Portuguese rider is hardly a household name on this side of the pond, that may be changing very soon.
Last year, Seabra made his debut on the Global Champions League (GCL) for the Monaco Aces, earning top 10 placings in Cannes, France in both GCL competition and the LGCT Grand Prix aboard Dourados.
Need one more reason to **watch this space**? In 18 rounds at 1.55m and 49 rounds at 1.50m, Seabra and Dourados jump clear at 67% and 57%, respectively, according to Jumpr.
