THE LONGINES GLOBAL CHAMPIONS TOUR

The Longines Global Champions Tour is not a fixture. It is a circuit of more than a dozen legs across four continents, running from early March to a playoff in November, and the cities change from one year to the next.

It is the richest series in equestrian sport, and it does not belong to the sport’s governing body.

The Private Circuit

Jan Tops won Olympic team gold for the Netherlands at Barcelona in 1992, and then looked at his sport from the outside.

What he saw was a discipline with no coherent global circuit. National shows, scattered championships, and no reason for anyone outside it to pay attention. In 2006 he started his own, with six legs, five of them in Europe, and an invitation to the world’s top thirty riders.

The circuit runs under the governing body’s rules and the governing body ratifies its calendar. Beyond that it has no part in it. This is a private series, owned and operated by the man who founded it, and it now offers more prize money than anything the federation runs.

In 2016 he added a league. The teams are franchises, bought rather than earned, named for cities rather than countries, with riders of different nationalities on the same side. Monaco Aces, New York Empire, Shanghai Swans. It is football’s structure applied to an individual sport, and it was by no means obvious that it would work.

The Cities

The other thing he changed was where the sport happens.

Show jumping had always been a country sport, held on grass at showgrounds outside towns. The Tour put it in the middle of cities: beneath the Eiffel Tower, beside the Formula 1 pit lane at Monaco, on the sand at Miami Beach, in Doha, Shanghai, Rome, London and New York.

An arena is built and taken away again, which is what makes the travelling possible and also what makes the calendar unstable. Legs are added and dropped, and a city that hosts one season may not host the next.

One venue is fixed. Valkenswaard in the southern Netherlands is Tops’s own arena, and the circuit calls it home.

What to Know

Check the calendar before planning anything. The host cities are announced season by season.

The season runs from March to November and closes with a playoff, which compresses a great deal of the year’s prize money into a single weekend.

The city legs are the ones to take. An arena assembled in a public square for four days is a different proposition from the same sport on a showground, and the crowd is different for it.

Longines has been the title partner since 2013, which is why the circuit is stable even when its map is not.

The Court

The Longines Global Champions Tour is not the Court’s own. Seats, hospitality and rooms are sought on a member’s behalf wherever the circuit goes, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Because the cities move, a member should say early which leg interests them.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.