July 22, 2026 
And now we’ve come to it: the end of the first season of Faultless: The Riders, their Horses, and the Pursuit of Excellence.
We’ve skittered from the flamboyant foulness of Darragh Kenny’s Destination Dublin, flown across the pond, and landed back where we started—at Spruce Meadows in Calgary, Alberta.
We are here on the storied venue’s 50th anniversary and our riders and their horses are vying for the largest single prize pot in show jumping history: 5 million dollars (Canadian, 3.6 million USD).
Leopaldo Palacios, course designer for Spruce Meadows for over three decades, sets the tone and the stage: “It’s a competition. It’s not a show. We are not exhibitors. We are competitors.”
This, he says, is what Spruce Meadows founder Ron Southern taught him many, many years ago. He took it to heart, designing some of the toughest courses the sport of show jumping has ever seen.
This reporter was covering the Masters last year, from the glorious alpine sweep of my white down comforter at my home in Wellington, Florida. Even at a comfortable remove, word reached me that Palacio had thrown down on the bucolic sweep of the international ring, a course that was variously termed “diabolical” and “unjumpable.”
But we all know how Spruce Meadows plays it and we all know what they would say were anyone to complain too loudly: “Don’t be a p—y!”
Because this ain’t a show, we are competitors and we are all here to get chewed up and spit out by what Kara Chad’s father refers to as the “meat grinder” that is Spruce Meadows.
(Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. Cowed, Kara Chad pull out of the Grand Prix.)
But for the purposes of this article, we are dealing with a show and that show, Faultless, is determined to go pure sport for the last arena-side foray of this docuseries. And sport we get, with nonstop action from both the Nations Cup and, of course, the three-round Grand Prix.
Only briefly are we are allowed a pause, to hang out with Kyle King and his wife outside the administrative shack, where he seems to spend a solid chunk of his time, asking and re-asking if he’s qualified for a ride on the big day.
(Spoiler alert! He makes it!)
And after a fault-free first round, he makes it into the second round, which I described as thus:
Set up a triple in the shadows, under the four large trees that grace the Spruce Meadows International arena. Add a dry ditch under the second jump of a double, something we show jumpers never see. Then give us a last line no one managed to jump without a fault, a last line consisting of those enormous set of double liverpools built into the south end of the arena jumping toward the in-gate. And once you have your horse stretching long over them, put up the famous spindly bicycle jump vertical right after. And don’t forget to top everything on this last line with invisible-to-horses red poles.
Out of 11 clears, only Scott Brash and Kyle King make it through the second round on four faults each.
We watch our other principals bite the dust one after the other: Kenny and Jessica Mendoza are not entered. Daniel Coyle loses loads of studs and the grand prix in the first round. Richard Vogel shocks by getting four faults on United Touch S. Matt Sampson retires. Lillie Keenan incurs four faults and mouths “fuck,” while Tiffany Foster, having just retired her best horse, racks up double-digit faults. Christian Kukuk and Willem Greve take themselves out of contention with time faults.
Round 2 brings Spruce and the producers of Faultless something they all long for: a spectacular fall that results in injury for neither horse nor rider. This allows them to replay the catastrophe on a loop while flashing back to the rider’s sad and stunned face as he walks off the field in his inflated safety vest.
Poor Martin Fuchs. He misjudges the distance to the first and lands on top of the oxer, from whence he falls dramatically to the ground. And then he walks, slowly and sadly, out of the arena, the camera hugging the lines of his face, blank with disappointment, all the way.
But at least he doesn’t have all the problems of his Swiss compatriot Steve Guerdat. After watching this series, I actually have no idea what keeps that guy ticking. He appears to be shattered by both pain and a persistent back injury to the point a normal mortal would just give up. But some sort of magic occurs when this dude is on a horse and the pain fades away and the legs apparently work, although he struggles even to walk when not in the saddle.
And where he’s walking after the Masters is right back into the O.R. where he will get ANOTHER surgery on the same spot in his back. However, before any of that occurs, he’s going to give his all in this “big as balls” Grand Prix.
Second-round time faults put him on the podium in third. Either the pain is on his side or we would have an immortal god to jump against.
Instead, we have a jump off between world number one Scott Brash, that brashly confident rider who can lose both reins and both stirrups and still win a class and Kyle King, who we are led to believe is barely competent and spends most of his time in a broke-down RV with his long-suffering, best-in-the-world wife (when he is not outside the administrative shack).
“I think you were unlucky,” says Scott Brash to Kyle King as they step onto the podium, he on top. His words are most definitely disingenuous—if he didn’t expect to win (who could?), I think he’s taking it in stride, and hardly expected an administrative-shack layabout to steal the prize he was pre-qualified for.
What King did do was blaze the track in a time of 46.09 as compared to Brash’s 46.97, but he dragged the top plank of the Canadian-flag vertical along with him as he passed over it and ceded the win to Brash with a four-fault score.
But, as he observes at the end, he’d rather go out with faults than go out with a slower time, which would be the mark of a super-lame loser, a judgment with which I quite frankly agree.
Here ends season one of Faultless, leading us all to ask the question in a manner close to begging: “Will there be a season two??? Come on, Richie is poised to be the next Grand Slam winner this September! Come on, I already got my plane ticket to Calgary and hotel reservation and I’m gonna jump in front of those cameras that I expect to be rolling!”
Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, BUT—I might have the answer to that question. Stay tuned for my exclusive interview with Ben Asselin and Kyle Koss, the producers of Faultless, coming as soon as I can write it up!
Faultless is streaming now on Roku Channel in the US and Canada.
