THE LONGINES GLOBAL CHAMPIONS TOUR
March through November · Seventeen Cities · A Season · Since 2006
The Longines Global Champions Tour is not a fixture. It is a circuit of seventeen 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 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. London Knights, Paris Panthers, Montreal Diamonds. It is football’s structure applied to an individual sport, and it was by no means obvious that it would work.
Other countries have copied the format since, which Tops takes as the compliment it is.
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 hosted last year may not host this one.
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. This is the only engagement in the Court’s year with no permanent address, and 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 and has committed to the end of the next decade, 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.
