THE WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL HORSE SHOW

The Washington International Horse Show is a week of show jumping, hunters and equitation in late October at the Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, outside Washington: classes free to watch by day from Monday to Sunday, three evenings of ticketed sport and entertainment from Thursday, and on the Saturday night the Longines FEI Jumping World Cup Washington, for the President’s Cup. It is the only indoor five-star World Cup qualifier for jumping in the United States.

In 1983 Anthony D’Ambrosio and a grey Thoroughbred named Sweet’N Low jumped a wall of 7 feet 7½ inches there, before 15,630 people, and set the indoor world record for the puissance. The ovation, the Chronicle of the Horse wrote, “might have been heard at the White House, 10 miles away.”

The Armory

The show was founded in 1958 and held for its first seventeen years in the National Guard Armory in Washington. In its early days it showed many breeds and disciplines at once: Nations Cup show jumping, hunt teams, side saddle, Saddlebreds, Quarter Horses, Arabians and Morgans, with driving, dressage and barrel racing.

In 1961 President Kennedy gave the presidential seal to the President of the United States Perpetual Cup, and the show’s honorary chairmen have included the First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Laura Bush. Scenes of the film The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit were shot there in 1968.

It moved to the arena at Landover, Maryland, later the US Air Arena, in 1975, and in 2000 back into the city, to what is now the Capital One Arena, where the hockey rink was melted for the week and stables were put up in F and 6th Streets, closing them to traffic. In 2020 and 2021 it went to Tryon, in North Carolina. Since 2022 it has been held at the Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, the county seat of Prince George’s County, which opened in 1993 and seats three thousand for a horse show.

Sweet’N Low was named for the sweetener his owners, Donald and Barbara Tober, made. The celebration afterwards, as the Chronicle reported it: “My wife and I are going to bandage the horse, put him away, return to the motel and try to find some dinner.”

World Cup Night

The days are for the hunters and the equitation riders, and cost nothing to watch. The WIHS Equitation Final is ridden in three phases, over a hunter course, then a jumper course, and then the top ten change horses. The show is rated CSI5*-W, with a CSI2*, the highest rating the FEI gives; it is a charity, and in 2026 it offers nearly a million dollars in prize money.

The evenings are the show. Thursday is Opening Night, given to the American military, with an American Flag jump that raises money for TAPS. Friday is Barn Night, with the pony jumper championships, a costume class for the international jumpers and the Shetland Pony Steeplechase, which came to the show in 2013 and which the Washington Post called “the newest & cutest sport in the D.C. area”. On Saturday morning it is Kids’ Day; in the afternoon the Ambassador’s Cup Grand Prix, new and worth $50,000, is jumped at two stars; and at night the World Cup, worth $340,000.

The VIP Club is a two-tiered room built over the ring, and its tables seat eight.

In 2026 the show, its sixty-eighth, runs from Monday 19 to Sunday 25 October: Military Night on Thursday 22 October, Barn Night on Friday 23 October, and World Cup Night on Saturday 24 October. Laura Kraut won the World Cup Washington in 2025 on Tres Bien Z.

What to Know

It runs for a week in the second half of October, from a Monday to a Sunday. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

Watching by day is free. In 2026 World Cup Night cost $40, or $115 with dinner, Barn Night $25 and Military Night $20. A VIP table for eight for the full week cost $15,000, and lesser tables from $2,000 a day.

Nothing is published, though Military Night asks for red, white and blue. A lounge suit: it is a World Cup night at a table over the ring.

The arena is at 14900 Pennsylvania Avenue, Upper Marlboro, and parking is free. The show’s preferred hotel is the Westin Washington National Harbor, its official hospitality campus, twenty-five minutes’ drive away.

The mistake is to buy a smaller table. Only the full-week table is sold for the evenings, when the five-star classes are jumped.

The Court

The Washington International Horse Show is not the Court’s own. A full-week table in the VIP Club, for World Cup Night, is sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay at National Harbor or in Washington, and the table afterward. The Court goes on to the National Horse Show in early November.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.