May 18, 2025 
Finally, the day dawned at the Royal Windsor Horse Show when the stakes were high enough.
I think about “stakes” a lot. In sport, and in life.
In the movie The Hours, Virginia Woolf’s husband asks, “Why does someone have to die [in the book she is writing]?
The answer: “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”
This scene has stayed with me and has been translated in my mind to: There’s gotta be stakes. And not just any stakes, the stakes have got to be commensurate with the risk. It means nothing to bet a nickel if you’ve got a thousand dollars in your pocket.
This is why people play the game of show jumping.
Or, I should say: this is why people should play this game.
Unfortunately, most owners are playing a false game, one in which they’re talked into an “investment” and convinced of a return.
It’s possible, I’m sure it’s happened. But if it were up to me, the whole sport would get a makeover and be rebranded the ultimate gambler’s paradise. Except—it’s more like life than tossing dice across a table.
In show jumping, you’re not just gambling to win a game, or a class, or a bit of money. You’re gambling the same way you do in life: against your better judgment, led by passion, monopolized by obsession, ultimately motivated by love.
Or revenge, depending on how the equestrian world has treated you.
Do not misread my words—the idea of actual gambling in show jumping is absolutely anathema to me. A lot of these guys (*waves hands around*) have fantasies of introducing gambling to show jumping. When they aren’t wishing it were Formula 1 and horses were machines, they’re imagining it like, I don’t know—horse racing?
A good way to turn a horse into a number, a list of statistics.
But don’t you get it? We’re already gambling.
We don’t need your apps and your handicaps. You think I’m gonna be at some show jumping OTB watching numbers scroll on a monitor?
Betting is a way of adding stakes. Another way is to put your heart on the line.
To play a game of stakes, you gotta be willing to lose. That’s the whole point. You lose in order that winning means something.
Most of the time in show jumping, we aren’t thinking about someone dying, horse or human. That’s, thankfully, very, very rare. This is a sport built on years of methodical training and extreme precision.
More often, the loss is financial. Horse purchases, vet bills, staff, show fees…
So when you have a chance at a €500k Rolex Grand Prix, that’s an amount of money that means something. There’s also the glory and prestige that comes with winning it. There’s eyes on you.
Here at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, I felt a bit lost in the endless pile of low-money ranking classes—not much in the way of stakes, especially at a show limited to 35 FEI riders.
Considering the quality of the crowd and the equestrian passion on display, the sun shining overhead (I’m told it’s often raining), we needed something MORE.
On Sunday, we got it. We had 32 riders vying for the €500k. Twelve riding for Great Britain, and 20 others taken mostly from the top of the ranking list. Four in the top ten.
The course was one that would terrify me were I to have a horse in it—there were no less than five delicate verticals! A “delicate vertical” is the true test of precision and a horse’s carefulness. Flashy jumps, like a triple or a very wide oxer, get cheers from the crowd, but it’s the delicate verticals that often frustrate a performance. Put a plank on top and you got something especially precarious.
Indeed, that nasty plank seemed to be knocked more often than not.
Speaking of frustrated, I had a list of riders I was rooting for, all of whom succumbed to stupid four-fault-itis, with fan-favorite Fuchs (last year’s winner) taken out with 12! I started to get so mad I told myself I was leaving.
I didn’t leave though. I couldn’t. Because yeah, the stakes, and this is what I had come for, after all.
In the end, we got ten in the jumpoff (the course designer was going for six, but such was the quality of the field).
Second to go was Ben Maher, world number 2. His was a blazing round, sure to win, but something went wrong at the last fence, a wide oxer up against the stands. Both horse and rider went down.
The horse was up instantly and exited the ring. The rider was down a few seconds longer, but popped up with a few unsteady steps, as riders, tough to the bone, are wont to do.
I felt a plunging despair, because as I said, usually the stakes you’re thinking about are the financial ones.
The insanity of that drive to the last oxer was not replicated. Good, because none of us had the heart for it. In the end, Gregory Wathelet took the win by six hundredths of a second with Bond Jamesbond de Hay, an enormously scopey and big-strided stallion, who also displayed admirable agility in the combinations.
The announcer informed us that the downed rider had been checked by the medics and was found to be uninjured.
I walked back to my hotel room meditating on mortality, burst into a voluminous nosebleed, and had to remind myself that it wasn’t me that fell off the horse after all.
Erica Hatfield’s #DestinationHorseShow European adventure next stops in Rome, the “Eternal City,” May 21–25.
