April 7, 2025 
Rising to the top in international show jumping can be a long game. For those that enter the business without wealth or an established name, in fact, it’s not unlike the longest game there is: That good ol’ American classic, Monopoly.
Instead of weighing the benefits of holding onto lucrative properties such as Boardwalk or Park Place, though, riders buy, train, and sell horses out of presumed advantage—or, sometimes, necessity.
They hope the horses they keep will advance their position in the overall standings; instead of bankrupting others to win the game, show jumpers aim for the top of the leaderboard. Maybe that’s a gold medal in the Olympic Games or a World no. 1 ranking. For others, it could be the top of the podium at FEI World Cup Finals.
Last weekend, in Basel, Switzerland, the latter goal became a reality for Julien Epaillard.
Riding his homebred, 12-year-old Selle Français gelding Donatello d’Auge, the “Flying Frenchman” won the speed on Day 1. Three days and three rounds of jumping later, Epaillard was still leading the class, the only rider in the field of nearly 40 who hadn’t dropped a single rail.
When he eventually did, knocking a pole during the second round on Sunday just seconds before clinching the overall win, Epaillard still had a rail in hand. But that didn’t matter to him in the moment. In his winner’s interview after the class, Epaillard lamented that he’d lost his cool in the final line; he wished he could have helped his horse more.
It’s an unusual comment for a man in his position at the time, though maybe not for Epaillard himself.
After all, the World’s no. 14-ranked rider had already made history earlier in the same competition when he decided to forgo the jump-off and a chance at top prize money on Friday in order to save his horse—the first competitor in at least 14 years to do so.
But Epaillard, perhaps more than anyone, knows that prize money comes and prize money goes. Despite being the world’s winningest Grand Prix rider at present with more than €9.2 million in career earnings (Jumpr), for most of his 47 years, Julien Epaillard was hardly a household name.
Growing up, Epaillard’s parents owned an equestrian center, and he was raised in the business. Thanks to notoriously speedy partnerships with homebred ‘d’Auge’ horses including Usual Suspect d’Auge and Safari d’Auge, by 2017, Epaillard had cracked the Longines Rankings’ top 50. But even then, at age 40, the French rider wasn’t well known outside his home country, having never jumped a senior championship on the world stage. Perhaps he should have been.
After all, in recent years, show jumping has come to recognize Epaillard as the ‘man-behind-the-curtain’ for an extraordinary number of horses currently competing at the top of the sport.
His first real recognition came in 2018, when Epaillard started riding for the Sadran family, who was then forming their own GCL team. Epaillard campaigned horses including Queeletta and Virtuose Champeix on the Longines Global Championship Tour while training future 5* LGCT Paris Grand Prix winner Jeanne Sadran.
Shortly thereafter, his partnership with Michel Hécart and Haras de La Roque would lead to rides on famous names such as Toupie de la Roque and Caracole de la Roque—with whom Epaillard won two and three 5* 1.60m Grands Prix, respectively.
It would be Caracole that finally took Epaillard to his first World Championship in 2022 at the age of 44. But those horses would eventually be sold and go on to 5* success under different flags: Belgium’s Pieter Devos (Toupie), and America’s Karl Cook (Caracole)—who took an Olympic silver team medal for the USA.
By early 2023, two then-11-year-old horses—Iron Dames Dubai du Cedre and Donatello d’Auge—took over top billing on Epaillard’s string for the following season. Back then, Dubai would earn the slight edge.
After multiple wins, including the LGCT Super Grand Prix in Prague in 2023 and a second place finish in the 2024 FEI Jumping World Cup™ Final in Riyadh, Dubai was selected as Epaillard’s partner for his first Olympic Games appearance at home in Paris in 2024. There, the pair helped the French team to a bronze medal, finishing fourth just off the podium in the individual standings.
Then, Dubai, too, was sold to Deborah Mayer’s Iron Dames string, where she now appears under the saddle of Germany’s Janne Friederike Meyer-Zimmermann.
Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that Epaillard’s first major championship victory at age 47 should come aboard one of his last, best hopes: Donatello d’Auge. After all, Donatello was bred by Epaillard’s wife Susana at their boutique Haras de la Bosquetterie stable in Normandy, where the couple produces fewer than 10 foals a year. Susana, herself, campaigned Donatello briefly in Olivia, Spain before her husband took over the reins in March of 2022.
As a young horse, the gelding was so advanced that Epaillard took him out of the field a year early, instead of waiting until his 6-year-old season, as he normally does with homebreds. Even today, the “easy” Donatello d’Auge is representative of his rider/breeders’ pared down philosophy, competing barefoot and in a hackamore.
Epaillard admits he doesn’t like to practice flatwork, instead working on the basics with the gelding over small jump courses two to three days a week. On warm evenings, when he’s not at shows, Donatello even spends the night outdoors in his field, just being a horse.
Call it a rider’s intuition, or maybe the four decades of experience under his belt, but newly-crowned FEI World Cup Finals Champion Julien Epaillard continues to judge what’s best for his horses the way he always has.
He bases it not on his own, short-term gain, but on the feeling they give him in the moment—whether that’s the age they are ready to move up, or whether one less round of jumping at a major championship is the right call. “I am not thinking about [ranking] points at the beginning of the month, I do my plan based on what the horses give me,” Epaillard told World of Show Jumping back in 2023.
“I am every day with my horses. That alone is still enough, as it has always been.”
