March 30, 2026 
It’s the end, the last hurrah!
And who else would write our ending but the best of the best, our favorite, the hero of those who love our sport of show jumping? The idol of those who call themselves the Kent Dolls?
But who isn’t a Kent Doll today?
Who isn’t a Kent Doll every day??
I am getting excited, but who isn’t excited???
There is so much to tell you, so much that happened this week, our last week of WEF, I can hardly think to begin. It feels natural to me to hold this week close, to simmer in it, to take a day, a week, a month, some part of a lifetime, so the words I write, 5 or 10 or 50 thousand of them, come out just right.
But deadline presses down, deadline spares no one, certainly not me—the one who dodged it all season with that achingly clingy virus, dodging it so often and so persistently that I nearly lost this column!
So let’s write it, as fast as we can! Let’s make a mess of it if we have to, shaking as our fingers batter out the words, because—KENT!
Where has this dude been all season? The Kent Dolls headquarters, I’m ashamed to say, spent several days this season (sometimes in a row), empty. Longtime readers know that I, this columnist, happen to be Secretary-General of the Kent Dolls, which is the super-secret, ultra-exclusive Team KPF fan club.
Last year, it seemed KPF and Greya leapt onto the scene all at once, thrilling us with victory after victory. Parties went down long and hard at the KD Headquarters. This year, Kent seemed to be everywhere but here!
In the interim, obsessions with Richard Vogel and Nina Mallevay flourished. And while we do not and cannot regret those, we are happy to bring hero-worship back home to where it belongs.
So let’s move to Saturday night, Saturday Night Lights, the last in our 2026 season. I was fielding texts all week long begging me for tickets, so that I oversold my table tremendously, wanting to accommodate everyone. There were the breeders and dealers and agents and clothing designers and young riders from Belgium and socialites and my own team and so many people to love and welcome and there was me!
And there was bourbon. And despite the snow crab and caviar and wagyu steak all on offer, I made it clear as I sat down that not one person was to bug me to get to eating because tonight was a night for drinking!
(I do not mix food and booze as it takes the edge off my intoxication. Not recommended for non-experts, do not try this at home! In fact, pretend I did not admit this—if you are not a proper white trash person like me and are, perhaps, like a Tiger Woods or something, or someone determined to drive a car (like why?), you cannot proceed in this fashion!)
Boy, did I love the course walk. EVERYONE was on the course, a crowd of thousands it seemed, and that course was five times bigger than the crowd!
Do I dare describe it? It started with a triple bar, replete with six live ferns, each decorating the top of a standard. It had the 1.60m Rolex wall, a water leading to a fragile skinny, rollbacks all over the place, liverpools and shaky all-red verticals (horses do not see red). And ONE MILLION DOLLARS on offer.
Now get this—I had a horse in it! Not since that delicious show in Dublin, another Rolex Series event, have I had a horse jumping the biggest of the big courses, so—of course—I really needed the bourbon!
It did not help that the course was so unyielding. I was told by my rider later that to enter the ring was like entering a place electrified. The stands were packed, the crowd alive. The ground under the bright lights felt like it was trembling with the excitement everyone was feeling. Anxiety was high.
In a field of 40 of the best riders in the world, there were five retirements and one elimination. There were eight with 16 faults or higher, none of them slouches in any respect.
I was terrified.
I left my table to shoot our Jagger HX (I am an amateur photog), heading first to the warmup. I saw him standing with the grooms and immediately communicated my terror. Lucky for me, he was wearing a noise-canceling bonnet and heard none of it, taking pets from his groom as if he were hanging out, relaxed, in his paddock back home.
The riders, however—they had fully-functioning ears and when I headed to the Hermés Rider Pavilion, I once again communicated my terror, but tried to do it calmly and sedately, as one tries to be supportive and encouraging, even when one feels the odds are stacked against everyone.
“I’m terrified!” I whispered to one top competitor.
“How do you think we feel??” she replied, later putting down a nearly-perfect 4-fault round and settling solidly within the money.
Incidentally, this rider, like so many of them, can be as frightened as an animal pinned in a corner by a fierce and bloody-toothed predator, facing down the void while screaming like the dude in Edvard Munch’s famous painting, and still she has no choice but to enter that electrified ring, because, as she told me during the qualifier, “If I weren’t riding horses, what would I do? There isn’t anything else for me to do.”
Of course there IS something else for her to do, maybe she could have pursued one of those so-called “normal jobs” or maybe she could’ve thought of popping out the kids, but we all know of what she speaks: the soul’s imperative.
I failed to take any warmup pics, my hands were shaking so terribly. I then moved ringside, where the competitor before my horse retired in face of the overwhelming course.
Now I cannot overly brag, but I can say my horse performed in respectable fashion, two silly mistakes and a couple of time faults, but no crashing, no burning, no hesitation at the hard questions, no falling off whatsoever!
I was delighted.
And then. HE and SHE entered the ring. That’s right—Kent and Greya.
Before HIM we had only two clears, Ben Maher with Enjeu de Grisien and Jordan Coyle with Chaccolino. He made a third, which was followed later by clears from Darragh Kenny with Eddy Blue and Richard Vogel with Gangster Montdesir.
In the end, we saw only two double clears. Kent OF COURSE and Ben Maher, who took second in dynamic fashion. Vogel blitzed the jumpoff course with the fastest time, but took out the last fence doing it. He ended in third.
And I got selfies of myself with ALL OF THEM, all three of those podium-placed guys! Wow!
And there I was, surrounded by the biggest fans of the sport, the best people in the world, not in the VIPer’s Nest at all, but in a place of flowers and butterflies and friendship and happiness and thrill and fandom! And snow crab and champagne and wagyu and little desserts, delectable, they bring to your table on a little plate!
The class was over, my rider was alive, and Kent was the winner! And I, three sheets to the wind, drunk on whiskey and sport, but standing, walking, smiling, shouting, taking photos and posing for pics like it was I who was the winner!
Eloquence fails me. I want to quote from someone known generally in our sport as The Voice, who also, I’ve learned, is a writer with post-graduate degree in literature (how can some people be SO PERFECT?):
“Sport rarely follows a script. And yet, every so often, it produces one that feels almost too perfect to be believable.”
How true! What more could any of us want than our heroes, Kent and Greya, to enter the ring and give us the win?
Sorry, Kent—you might be sitting at home feeling very proud of yourself and counting your winnings, but this one doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to us! To all those people pressing themselves against the green Rolex barriers put up to stop them from mobbing you completely. Those little kids who dream of being where you are (they have no idea) and also that drunk superfan, overconfident of her charms, who ignores the barriers completely and begs for a selfie, not caring what dignity she’s forsaking!
Yeah, sometimes sport is like that—a gift.
Thank you.
