July 15, 2026 
Show jumping has started flooding all our screens.
On the heels of the release of Faultless, Box to Box Films producing a series on the upcoming inaugural season of the Premier Jumping League, and the announcement that the film Jumpers, starring young rider Skylar Wireman, will be expanded from 16 minutes to feature length, we are seeing a whole load of new media portraying our favorite sport.
Now we have a new entrée into the field: On the Fringe. It’s a film that purports to tell the story of Chilean show jumper Gabriela Reutter, but ends up being about a lot more.
The film was created and produced by husband-and-wife team Sam and Jennifer Baynes, who are ambitious entrepreneurs. It was conceived as a marketing ploy for their event management software, Pegasus. Oddly, that fact seems to have helped it rather than to have turned it into something bland and uninteresting.
Sam Baynes, whose thoughts open the film, got involved with (and eventually married to) an equestrian. Now his life has become the horse world.
He refers to himself as “just another victim.”
But this victim is hardly a passive one. He’s a fascinated one, and, as he tells us in the opening scenes of the film, he set himself the goal of understanding why so many people are saddled with such an overriding obsession with both horses and the sport.
Since he discovered the world of show jumping, he tells us, he’s been analyzing the big question: Why?
“I’ve spent six years researching it, trying to understand why this sport persists in a world that makes no financial sense and after all that research, I’ve just come to the conclusion that…little girls love horses!”
At these words, a massive cheer goes up from the crowd of nearly 200 people who have gathered in Palm Beach, Florida at the Palm House for the opening screening of the film.
“We all know someone who fits into this category. We either have a sister, a cousin, or a daughter that is just obsessed with horses. They draw horses in art class. They get horse figurines for Christmas. And they run around the backyard playing horses with their friends. There’s just something hardwired in young girls that they love horses.
“Naturally, most outgrow this obsession. But some don’t. And so the question is, what happens with all that love if you never outgrow it?”
A piercing question, that one, and I could see around me the whole horsey crowd (boys included) cringing just a bit as if Sam’s gaze, in the gloom of the theatre, was fixed right on them.
Lucky for us, Reutter leaps into the frame to tell her story.
First—the conceit of the film. The filmmakers, which include Brady Clayton as director and editor, are interested in telling the story of an athlete who is, as they refer to it, “on the fringe.” To be on the fringe is to have just enough money and horsepower to be looking in at the highest level of the sport, but not quite enough to fully join it.
So this film, which runs just under an hour, is not interested in telling the usual story of the highest-level riders on the top circuit, but in telling a story of an athlete who longs to be there, but is facing seemingly insurmountable financial barriers.
And as we are introduced to Gaby, her life in Wellington, and her unbelievably charismatic family, we also find ourselves flooded with questions such as:
What does it mean to have a dream? What do we expect our families to sacrifice for it? Who deserves to have these dreams? To what are they entitled to make them come true? Is the stubborn desire to “make it” worth the sacrifice? What is “making it” anyway? Does a trip to the Olympics justify it all?
Because that is Gaby’s stated mission: to be the first female show jumper from Chile since 1972.
Many people know Gabriela Reutter through her social media, where she has over 100 thousand followers on both Instagram and Tik Tok. The happy horse girl she portrays hides her main reason for adhering so strictly to constant content creation: ambition.
Reutter introduces us to the sport with explanations that suit an equestrian and non-equestrian audience alike. We also get glimpses of five-star riders and coaches Amy Millar and Andrew Bournes, both of whom she has trained with. They give incisive commentary on the difficulties of translating years of training into 90 seconds in the ring, where things can either go well or go catastrophically wrong.
And more questions flood in: How many horses do you need to compete at the top level? How much money do you need? What is it to do a sport where there are no days off and no off-season? What does it mean for ambitious young riders when those at the top of the sport can ride until they’re 70? Why is the horse world on one side so flush with money and on the other so bad at distributing it?
Is there a meritocratic way of distributing resources in the horse world? Or should we count ourselves lucky that there is a method of buying your way in? I mean, what athlete is buying their way into the NFL? Would the horse world be better off if it were a vicious meritocracy like other sports?
I should mention, before I go on, that the film is not only a source of all these weighty questions, but a beautiful ode to the sport and the love of the horse. Because we never forget, as we are shown Gaby with her horses, that love of them is what has brought her here.
And, for those of us in the audience, what has brought us here.
The film ends, the lights go up and the Q&A session begins. We watch the filmmakers and their star field question after question, which morphs into lengthy discussion, as if we were all at a USEF town hall (yes, this journalist/horse owner found herself spouting off despite herself–oops) and you find a group of people obsessed not just with horses and the sport, but what the sport is and what it will become.
And what was planned as a casual conversation of maybe thirty minutes turns into an hour and half that would have gone longer if we all weren’t horse people that had to be up at five the next morning!
The filmmakers and Pegasus hope to continue the On the Fringe series by showcasing athletes from many equestrian disciplines, such as dressage, eventing, and reining.
Watch the full movie, for free, on YouTube:
