June 23, 2026 
For those of us intimately involved in show jumping, the sport is a complete and total obsession. It is rare that we think about anything else, even rarer that we talk about anything else, so the looming question in all our minds is—why isn’t everyone else obsessed just like us?
The answer is simple: other people just haven’t been exposed to the sport, but if they were, they too would be spending all their time and money on it, breaking every bit of their heart over it, into a million different pieces!
Related aside: I feel the need now to quote the late poet Andrea Gibson:
Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there better be a thousand separate heavens
for all of my separate parts.
And then the talk starts: how are we going to rescue these sad and lonely people from their sad and lonely horse-less and sport-less lives so they can be happy like us?
Ok, yeah, it’s true, I guess you can’t exactly call us happy, so let’s just say we must find a way of bringing the entirety of the whole rest of the world into a misery like ours, which justifies itself by allowing us to live according to our natures: monomaniacal, horse-loving, adrenalin-seeking, risk-embracing, jet-setting, money-spending, sweat-soaked, manure-smelling, sleep-deprived—
Ok, writing it out is maybe not the way to recruit. (Although I am not anywhere near giving up on this project. Look for my tell-all memoir, coming out…someday). Maybe a better way is to produce a film or docuseries to bring the sport to the don’t-know-what-they’re-missing masses.
Enter Faultless: The Riders, Their Horses, and the Pursuit of Excellence, a six-part docuseries produced by Spruce Meadows in partnership with Rolex.
Information on the series has not been easy to come by. Only a week ago, the trailer was released. Desperate for more information, I began a campaign of texting, but found no flashy premiere to attend, nor even a less-flashy press conference to lurk in the back of.
“Hmm,” I thought, “Not a good start to popularizing the sport, but perhaps this is strategic deployment of scarcity?”
It leaves me with nothing but the end product and the thoughts running through my head (my editor’s favorite fodder) in which to entertain you, dear reader.
And so let’s begin with recapping episode one: The Spruce Meadows Masters, Part I.
All roads in this docuseries lead to the Spruce Meadows Masters Grand Prix edition 2025, in which a flush and generous Spruce Meadows splurged to celebrate their 50th anniversary in style with a 5-million-dollar (Canadian) prize pot, the largest ever single-day event payout in the sport of show jumping.
(Incidentally, I wrote this one up last year, but if you don’t want to know how this whole docuseries ends, don’t go clicking this link!)
The docuseries begins in typical Spruce fashion with several riders shown crashing their horses and falling into the water jump (delightful!). Spruce clings to its vision of the sport, a brutal one where riders routinely find themselves face first in turf or in a ditch as the horse gallops away unencumbered by its luckless pilot.
And here’s a woman holding a newly-minted infant. “People think he’s kind of an asshole,” she intones, speaking of her husband Christian Kukuk, “but there’s this whole other side to him.”
Have we identified the villain of the series (every show needs one)? And it’s no less than the reigning Olympic individual champion? Later, we are shown a shot of Kukuk wearing one of those baby papooses and I wonder how we are gonna successfully hate this guy while he’s bouncing the adorable infant on his knee.
Now we are told we are gonna follow 14 of the best riders in the world and I’m able to identify almost all of them: I see Fuchs! There’s Darragh! Daniel! Matt Sampson and Jessica Mendoza of scrappy fight-their-way-to-the-podium-from-nearly-last-place-position-every-time Team Great Britain! Did I see Guerdat? Sophie Hinners is in there and Tiffany! And Dani is there to explain everything with a colorful flash of her feathers!
But this episode gives us generous doses of three riders: Richard Vogel, Lillie Keenan, and who-is-that-guy Kyle King, a rider, we are told, none of these jet-setting Europeans have ever heard of.
The only problem is I have heard of Kyle King and have learned to fear him in the competition ring, but I’m not supposed to because, while Kukuk is our villain, King is our underdog.
And we are promised “unprecedented access” to everyone’s private life, which makes me cringe and pull back into my shell like a turtle being accosted. But, at least in this first episode, “unprecedented access” seems to mean shots of the riders working out as well as Kyle King and his wife Emily claiming their relationship “gets better every day,” with a quick exchanged look that makes the viewer wonder to what extent they’re lying.
We also get to see Lillie Keenan’s childhood bedroom in New York City. It’s a prettily feminine space with framed equestrian accomplishments covering nearly the entirety of the available wall space. We also learn that one sister is a professional ballerina while the brother played professional hockey in Sweden. And all of them were expected to achieve not only in sport, but in academics as well, with the camera giving us a quick shot of Lillie’s Harvard degree.
Lillie Keenan—beautiful, accomplished, and nearly perfect in a way that inspires both admiration and envy. But before you get too jelly, Cracked Vessel, consider this: no one is expecting you to be perfect (how could they?), so luxuriate in that freedom.
Back at Spruce, Lillie enters a qualifying jump off and comes in too slow, ceding the win to Vogel, who stands next to an enormous trophy with a wide, dorky smile.
“You want to beat everybody every time,” says Lillie. “Otherwise you’re no good.”
Asked to describe the stage she’s at in her career, she simply says, “Early.”
We’re back at Spruce, where the unknown Kyle King plows the last fence in another qualifier, which Vogel also wins on a different horse (CLOUDIO!). There he is, standing next to an even bigger trophy with that same wide, dorky smile.
“Our sport is very mental,” he says.
“Richie can be very moody,” says fellow German teammate Sophie Hinners.
“I feel like we’re just wasting jumps and wasting money,” says Tiffany Foster. Ok, she said that right at the beginning, a piece of audio sent floating out over b-roll, but man—doesn’t that just about describe it for so many of us so much of the time?
Just not for Richie, not right now. He is shown hugging a fan. Now he is signing something for a fan. Now he’s kissing a fan, cheek to cheek to cheek to cheek.
“Throughout the week, it’s nice to pick up some ribbons,” he says, while underdog King and his wife hover outside the little office booth that holds some Spruce Meadows administrative staff, hoping they’ve done math that lets him into one of the 40 slots in the 5-million-dollar Grand Prix (Canadian).
Does he make it? Well, you probably know but put it out of your mind, because we are going on this journey together! And tomorrow (yes, the entire series was dropped all at once, but I’m on a GLP-1, so I ain’t gonna binge), we head to the best horse show of them all, our beloved La Baule!
Check out Faultless: The Riders, Their Horses, and the Pursuit of Excellence available on the RokuChannel and I didn’t pay a thing to watch it, so—no excuses! Check back here tomorrow for my thoughts on episode 2.
