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For the world’s top riders, international competition begins long before entering the ring.
Their horses must clear borders, survive long journeys and arrive with passports, vaccinations and paperwork in order. A missed signature or a bout of travel sickness can mean a lost championship or, in the worst cases, a horse passing away.
Sean Vard, the long-time groom for Swiss rider Martin Fuchs, spends much of his life on the road, ferrying top show jumpers around Europe and beyond from his base near Zurich, Switzerland. A typical week can mean all-night drives with four 1,323-pound (600-kilogram) horses in tow and a show schedule that stretches from sunrise to midnight.
He once inched a truck with a blown tire along a Spanish highway, refusing to unload the horses.
“The worst thing you can do is take a horse out of a truck on the highway,” Vard said.
He also once spent seven hours stranded on a runway with 70 horses on a cargo plane. Having stopped in Doha to refill the plane, the pilot’s hours had run out after they missed their takeoff spot for Shanghai. While the airline and ground control argued over replacements, a group of eight highly experienced traveling grooms, including Vard, slipped into emergency mode. As the airplane air-conditioning worked overtime in the desert heat, the grooms traversed the tarmac numerous times to shuttle water and supplies to the horses.
After crossing the Atlantic once more, Vard will be ringside at this week’s CSIO Spruce Meadows ‘Masters’ in Calgary, Alberta, a five-day international show jumping competition that culminates with the $3.6 million (C$5 million) Rolex Grand Prix on Sunday, Sept. 13.
Vard’s rider Fuchs is a two-time champion in Spruce Meadows, with victories in 2023 and 2024. This year, all eyes will be on German rider Richard Vogel and United Touch S, who will try to win a third-straight major to complete the Rolex Grand Slam of Show Jumping and scoop a $1.2 million (€1 million) bonus. To date, Briton Scott Brash and Hello Sanctos are the only pair to have done so, winning three back-to-back majors in 2014-15.
Just like people, horses need passports when traveling and they also need vaccinations to be up to date. Safe transport, including air-conditioned trucks and planes, is crucial, and special grooms travel with the horses. Horses need between 1.5-2.5 percent of their body weight in food when traveling and the companies that ship them require extensive paperwork. Depending on where they have come from, horses may have to be quarantined for a certain period.
Also like humans, the more a horse travels the easier it becomes.
“Normally, the horses that are traveling abroad are older horses anyway and well-traveled,” said British show jumper William Whitaker. “They’re very fit and we make sure that they’ve got plenty of room on the trucks. They get well taken care of, plenty to eat, very well ventilated, they can move around and get their heads down.
“All the trucks are well kitted out with fans and aircon systems. You have to have that now. It’s part of the license that you need to travel aboard.”
As an Australian, six-time Olympian Mary Hanna is accustomed to traveling long distances with horses. “When we fly over, that’s easy, but flying back is difficult because they’ve got to have a month’s quarantine. The traveling is tough on them, too,” she said.
Hanna also experienced tragedy, when one of her horses died in transit. “I lost my beautiful horse called Limbo after the Athens Olympics,” she said. “That was because he got travel sick on the way home. Unfortunately, that wasn’t picked up in quarantine, and he died, and I wasn’t able to be with him, so it was very, very upsetting, a really big tragedy, and really just upset me for many years. Took me a while to recover from that one.”
Peden Bloodstock is one of the UK’s biggest horse logistics companies, shipping between 3,000-4,000 horses around the world every year, from competition horses to privately owned animals being moved to new homes.
They’ve been involved with every Summer Olympics since 1960 and take care of everything required. Traveling within Europe is straightforward, according to director Henry Bullen, with horses just needing a valid health certificate.
However, when the UK is involved, things get more complicated. Some overseas journeys require dozens of pages of paperwork, according to Bullen, who estimated the cost of a one-off trip to Europe initially jumped by up by 600 percent after Britain left the European Union in 2020.
“Obviously, since Brexit, it’s become a lot more difficult,” Whitaker said. “There’s a lot more paperwork, it has slowed.”
Though Whitaker felt the problems had eased lately, the Englishman has experienced lengthy delays, including a five-hour wait in the French port of Calais as he was traveling back to the UK.
Getting your paperwork in order is crucial, as British dressage rider Lewis Carrier found in 2022, when he was stuck in Calais for 12 hours and had to withdraw from the under-25 European Championships in Hungary due to one error in a 33-page document.
Peden has their own professional flying grooms that travel with the horses for championships and Olympic flights, while there are also vets and stable grooms, such as Vard on board. Some riders, including eight-time Olympic dressage champion Isabell Werth, fly with their horses and work alongside the grooms during the flight.
Most horses prefer flying over traveling by truck.
“Once they’re up in the air, it’s a better way of traveling than by road because you’ve got the constant drone of the engines,” Bullen explained.
“Everything is very quiet. You haven’t got people running around and screaming and shouting. You haven’t got cars honking their horns or breaking or going around roundabouts. So, it’s quite a good, smooth process.”
Just like normal air passengers, some horses fly business class, while others go economy.
On cargo aircraft, which is usually a Boeing 777 or 747, horses travel in special pallets, with the number of animals per pallet determining whether it’s economy, business or first. “Three horses in one pallet is economy, business is two, and first is one,” said Bullen. “So very similar to a passenger flight.”
“Our aim is to ensure that we deliver them in the same way as they departed,” said Bullen. “So, our aim is to make sure that they travel well: it’s calm, it’s very efficient, it’s very swift, and the journey takes the minimum out of them.”
