THE DUTCH MASTERS
Mid March · The Brabanthallen, ’s-Hertogenbosch · Four Days · Since 1967
The Dutch Masters is four days of indoor jumping and dressage in the middle of March, and the first of the four Majors that make up the Rolex Grand Slam. The season opens here.
Some sixty thousand people come to a hall in a medieval Dutch town that most of them could not place on a map.
The Slam
The Grand Slam of Show Jumping was created in 2013 and consists of four events: two outdoors at Aachen and Spruce Meadows, two indoors at Geneva and here. The Dutch Masters completed the quartet in 2018.
The prize goes to any rider who wins the Grand Prix at three of them consecutively.
One man has done it. Scott Brash won at Geneva, then at Aachen, then at Spruce Meadows, and completed the treble in 2015. Nobody has managed it since, and in more than a decade nobody has come close.
That is what the Grand Slam is for. It is not a points table. It is a standing challenge that has been answered once.
The Town
’s-Hertogenbosch is a walled town in North Brabant, and it gave its name to a painter. Hieronymus van Aken signed his work Bosch, after the place, and the Garden of Earthly Delights was made a few streets from where the horses now jump.
The show began in 1967 as Indoor Brabant and was renamed in 2017, when it joined the Grand Slam and needed a name the rest of the world could pronounce.
Dressage was added in 1983, and the town holds an unusual claim from it. The first World Cup Final for dressage riders ever held was held here, in 1986, and won by a Dane. The final has returned eleven times since. In 2012 the Brabanthallen staged the World Cup Finals for jumping and dressage in the same week, which no venue had done before.
What to Know
Indoor is a different sport. The arena is smaller than an outdoor ring, the turns come faster, and a horse that jumps well in a field at Aachen in June may be out of its element in a hall in March. Riders win here on adjustability rather than on scope.
Sunday holds the Rolex Grand Prix. Saturday holds the dressage freestyle, which is the better ticket if a choice has to be made and the one most people overlook.
The hall is warm and the seats are close. This is the one Major where a spectator sits within a few metres of a fence, and the sound a horse makes landing carries in a way it never does outdoors.
Den Bosch is an hour from Amsterdam and forty minutes from Eindhoven, and the town is small enough to walk.
The Court
The Dutch Masters is not the Court’s own. Seats, hospitality and rooms in a town with few of them are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.
The Court keeps all four Grand Slam Majors on its calendar, which means a member may follow the whole of it across a year: here in March, Aachen in the summer, Spruce Meadows in September, Geneva in December.
