Riding the Saut Hermès

Under the glass roof of the Grand Palais, the first thing you notice is not the logo, but the sand. The nave has been transformed into an improbable indoor beach for horses: cabins in place of boxes, glittering rails instead of parasols, the clip-clop of hooves rather than waves. Over three days, the Saut Hermès turns this Belle Époque greenhouse into a laboratory for what showjumping can be when it is treated as a complete experience.

The official description calls it a “five‑star international showjumping competition of the highest level”, but that undersells what is actually happening under the nave’s vast steel and glass skeleton – a remnant of 1900s World’s Fair optimism. The course, designed by Santiago Varela Ullastres and Gregory Bodo, the duo behind the Paris Olympics, sets vertiginous lines that pull the riders into tight, technical questions. Seventy riders and nearly 130 horses make the pilgrimage; the Grand Prix fences peak at 1.60 metres, which is as high as the sport dares to go indoors. From the stands, you feel the peculiar tension of the crowd collectively breathing in as the riders approach the obstacles.

The weekend’s results read less like a list and more like a thesis on what top‑level showjumping currently rewards. On Friday, Dutch rider Willem Greve and his horse, Candy Luck Z, set the tone in the Prix du Grand Palais with a round so efficient it felt like a drafting exercise, while François‑Xavier Boudant and the 15‑year‑old Brazyl du Mézel stole the Prix Hermès Sellier from Julien Épaillard by two hundredths of a second – a reminder that instinct and nerve still count for as much as breeding and budgets. Saturday’s Saut Hermès belonged to Belgium: Pieter Devos and Jarina J were the only pair to marry caution and ambition across two 1.55‑metre rounds, their double clear underlining that, at this level, the bravest thing you can sometimes do is nothing extra at all. By Sunday, the competition had distilled down to pure execution. Latvia’s Kristaps Neretnieks and Quintair took the Prix de la Ville de Paris with a line so tight it rewrote the track for everyone after him, before Scott Brash and Hello Chadora Lady delivered that immaculate, hundredth‑free jump‑off in the Grand Prix Hermès, turning all those marginal decisions – one less stride here, one wider turn avoided there – into Great Britain’s first win under the Grand Palais roof.

If all of this sounds like any other stop on an increasingly crowded five‑star calendar – more than a hundred such shows around the world each year, as Ugo Borao, Hermès’s Director of the Equestrian métier, gently reminded me – that is because we haven’t talked about everything that happens off the sand. “The Saut Hermès is clearly different in many ways,” he said. “We invite them to an international competition, the Hermès way.”

The Hermès way, as it turns out, involves a great deal of narrative infrastructure. There is a dedicated equestrian bookshop in the galleries - La Chaîne d’encre – where authors of horse literature sign volumes on anatomy, politics, and pony‑club comics in between competitions. There is a family paddock where children queue for Shetland pony rides and grooming workshops, learning to brush goats and ponies with the solemnity of very small grooms. There is a VR experience titled “Venture Beyond”, which invites you to put on a headset and be transported to “faraway horizons” in line with Hermès’s 2026 theme. I watched a six‑year‑old and, a few minutes later, someone who must have been at least sixty‑five make the same delighted grab for the virtual reins. My own experience gave me the feeling that one of the riders might share, that of improbable soaring and exhilaration.

And then, of course, there is the pop‑up shop: an ephemeral Hermès boutique edited down to objects that make sense in this context – horse ear muffs and saddle pads, whips and perfumes (the fragrance titled Paddock, of course!), and leather things that look as though they might have cantered off the set of an early Lartigue photograph. “The pop‑up shop, I love,” Borao said, almost offhand. “It’s a piece of the Hermès dream.” The dream is not just ownership but proximity: standing inches away from an artisan‑saddler as they explain, in patient detail, why a double‑bespoke saddle must take into account the measurements of both horse and rider; understanding that the saddle is, in his words, “a fixed object that reconciles, like a connecting line, as fine as possible, two bodies in motion.”