Show jumping prize money

The fifty at the top of 3,331. Every rider above £2,000 or eight paid rounds has a page of their own, which is 955 of them; the rest appear on the class they were paid at. The full list is on the money list.

Reading a chart like this one in another sport, the bars would be wages. Here they are the sum of a great many individual cheques, most of them small: the median placing across the whole set is £85 and the biggest single cheque in show jumping is €500,000 for winning at Aachen.

A horse jumps for eight or ten seasons at the top and is usually ridden by one person throughout, so a horse ranking and a rider ranking are close but not the same: a rider who changes horses carries their record forward and the horse does not.

Three shows out of 19 hold 65.9% of the money, and CHI Geneva alone holds £7,538,484 of it. That concentration is the sport rather than a gap in the data: a five-star week pays more in six days than a year of one-star shows, and the calendar has about a dozen of them.

2020 is missing because almost nothing was run: the calendar closed in March and the shows that came back in the autumn were national and mostly unpriced. The climb from 2021 is the calendar refilling rather than the pots growing.

A five-star class pays a median £1,124 and a one-star class £34. The entry fee is capped at €440 a horse at one star and is not capped at all at five, which is the arithmetic every rider below the top of the sport is doing. What it costs to be there sets the fees against the cheques.

Where to next

The rankings, the shows and the rules that split the money