May 17, 2025 
This was the day the King came to the Royal Windsor Horse Show.
This was also the day I fell in love with it.
Now, I don’t want to get anyone excited—I did not see the King and I was not asked to step back, unless that is to happen later today, or tomorrow. What I did see is a reel of him arriving on Insta, and I recognized him immediately. I did not need to read the caption. I did not need to ask Coach who that guy is. I’m practically British at this point!
The celebrity I did see in person was the equestrian influencer Esme. I only learned of her existence a few days ago, because I’m terribly self-absorbed, but thought as a budding influencer I must know the competition.
Esme is bright and sunny, like a yellow flower. She seemed to radiate happiness. She looks like the sort of person who has never had occasion to cry. The line to meet her and snap a selfie stretched far across the grassy grounds.
In truth, she’s not so unlike many people at this show—beautiful, well-dressed, elegant in deportment, gracious in communication.
The way the people dress here is a delight. Elegant, but not boring. Gatsby-esque for the men. Hats everywhere. Men in full suits. Women in long, flowered dresses.
Overhead, the sun shines on us all, the sky is blue. I no longer even notice the planes, and the grass is green and soft.
My endless puzzling over the show jumping schedule yesterday left me irritated and even worse, full of opinions (my persistent vice), so I was determined to get out of the Castle Arena (home of international showjumping) and go further afield. This I did, with the result of seeing many incredibly dashing ponies and other spectacular native breeds.
I also spent much time watching combined driving (team of four), an absolutely riveting discipline that I know nothing about.
Apparently it is patterned after eventing, with three phases, and it looks incredibly technical and difficult. The horses are beautiful. The main way of communicating with them seems to be a sort of guttural scream, tremendously loud and disturbing, the sort of sound I think would be made if one were to be run over by a steam roller, starting at the feet.
But despite myself, I was sucked back ringside to watch the sport I, with much hubris, persist in claiming as my own.
Today brought us two ranking classes of the lowest value. With my determination to watch something besides show jumping, I arrived at the arena just in time to see the jump off from the first, a spectacular demonstration of riding, with rollbacks from the likes of Victor Bettendorf and Daniel Deusser that made me erupt in delighted laughter.
This one was a winning round. It was the sort that carried the faults forward—tell me, what is the point? Do not talk to me about the justice of rewarding a double clear, talk to me about upping the stakes in the second round and injecting excitement. Did you see Bettendorf’s time of 33.36? Did you see a show jumping superfan in the stands laughing with delight at those smooth-as-silk rollbacks?
It was fine though, victory went to Lorenzo de Luca at 33.77, and his performance, coming at the end of a string of convincing ones, each faster than the last (save for Bettendorf, consigned to obscurity for his first-round faults), was satisfying.
What was not fine was the next nearly identical class, coming right on the heels of the first, with the distinction that this one had the usual jump off made up of the first-round clears. By this time, the stands had filled and thousands of spectators awaited something at least equally exciting.
They weren’t to get it.
Nearly everyone in the smallish field of 29 (larger than the last with 22, as the prize money went from 28k to 50k), either knocked poles or accumulated time faults, as the course designer, for some confounding reason, laid out a time allowed so tight it was like my—
No, I’m not going there.
Let’s just say no one was succeeding. The horses were jumping flat, knocking poles, in an effort to make the time. What were we all doing, rushing to get to the airport? Time allowed is often used in these sorts of competitions to keep the time the class takes up at a reasonable length. But we had all afternoon and a field of less than 30.
In the end, only two made it to the uninspired jumpoff, Martin Fuchs and Kim Emmen, with Fuchs taking the win. Afterwards, he expressed a desire to have avoided the jump off altogether, since Emmen put in the only other clear round nearly at the end.
Meanwhile, I expressed frustration and disbelief to my neighbors in the stands, saying such things as: “What’s the point?” “This is absolutely stupid!” and “WHY???”
Do I need to point out that without the ridiculous time allowed, we would have had a six-person jump off with no less than THREE members of the local royalty, the Whitakers???
My neighbors began to get uncomfortable, and I was disappointed in myself, lapsing once again into that person-with-opinions, instead of maintaining my calm receptive writer-as-observer demeanor.
“I hate you,” I said to myself as I hoofed it back to the Media Center.
There I wrote up this love-letter missive to horse sports, while a 1m class blooper reel played on the monitor. Cheered by the Spruce-Meadows-like display of rail-knocking and horse-stopping, I was informed by someone that I needed to stop laughing because that was a live feed of something called “Team Jumping” that was happening in the arena I had just left.
“I hate you,” I repeated to myself.
Follow Erica Hatfield’s European #destinationhorseshow tour on Eye Candy Jumpers Instagram.
