July 14, 2025 
If Lillie Keenan doesn’t have a personal assistant yet, she may need to look into one.
Though you could hardly say Keenan has been putting her feet up since she moved out of the equitation divisions and into the highest ranks of the sport more than a decade ago, the American rider does seem to be a little busier these days.
Or maybe she’s just spending a lot more time climbing podiums.
Not only is Keenan be-bopping around Europe’s most prestigious 5* circuits this summer, she’s become an increasingly reliable player for the U.S. on Senior Nations Cup teams in 2025. Whether that’s because her string has come of age—or that Keenan, herself, has assumed a kind of ‘veteran status’ among the U.S. Team ranks at the tender age of 28—it’s clear she is firing on all cylinders.
Take her recent string of performances at CHIO Aachen, arguably the sport’s most prestigious stage.
Not only did the former Big Eq prodigy receive the ‘style award’ at Aachen, she and Argan de Beliard came up large for Team USA in the Mercedes-Benz Nations Cup on Thursday, producing the only double-clear effort for the winning squad—one of only five in the entire competition. It’s a performance that echos their first Longines League of Nations appearance at Ocala this March (pictured), where the pair put in yet another, high-stakes, 0/0 effort for their country.
On Saturday at Aachen, Keenan and the 8-year-old Chagrin d’Amour finished on top of the podium in the Sparkassen Youngster Cup Final; on Sunday, she and Fasther were 6th in the Rolex Grand Prix. And Keenan wasn’t done yet.
This weekend at the inaugural running of the Baran Global Hunter Classic, Keenan dusted off her shadbelly and mounted Spoken to help her good pal Geoffrey Hesslink and team take the win in this first-ever, Nations Cup-style hunter competition held in Valkenswaard, the Netherlands.
“I obviously hadn’t ridden a hunter in a really long time, so I was a little rusty, but I had a lot of fun!” Keenan said after the class. “Honestly, it was kind of exciting to go back to my childhood, in a way, and to ride with such a strong team.
“We joked a little bit—I was in Aachen last week doing something a bit different, and I had to pretty quickly change, so I had to lean on [Geoffrey] a little bit, and we really worked together.”
To be sure, if you have to be “a little rusty” at the hunters, putting up a series of clear, fast, 5* rounds at CHIO Aachen is as good a reason as any. Keenan’s star has been on the rise for the better part of five years, since she first cracked the Longines Rankings top 100 (she currently sits at #35 in the world).
The American rider earned her first 5* Grand Prix victory at La Silla at MLSJ Monterrey, Mexico in 2022, and since that time, she’s won at least one 5* Grand Prix a year—two in 2023—earning her more than €3.4 million in career prize money. This summer, however, Keenan is in a league of her own, and the numbers don’t lie.
In 2024, she competed 25 rounds at a 1.60m+ and jumped clear 32% of the time. Since June 20, the first day of summer, however, Keenan has jumped clear in six rounds at 1.60m+ a whopping 83% of the time, finishing in the top 10 at 80%.
Who wouldn’t raise an icy-cold glass of Arnold Palmer to that?
