The Cannes International Show Jumping Festival is unlike any other event in the world of international equestrian competition. The site, just a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean, in a town where the almost perfect is not good enough, is unique. For 27 years, the competition has been able to ride with the times by offering the finest show jumping. This year, the Hesperides Stadium’s public will be discovering dressage. The finest dressage, of course.
From the Renault-Jump in the Eighties to the Global Champions Tour today, via the fabulous Marina Picasso époque and Pulsar Triple Crown period (and the $750,000 won by the Italian Jerry Smit), the Cannes Show Jumping Festival has always been able to differentiate itself. To the point of becoming one of the most highly-rated competitions on the international circuit. And when Jan Tops, the Global Champions Tour’s inventor and promoter, was looking for the ideal site for the French round, it didn’t take him long. Cannes and its history, Cannes and its very special stadium, Cannes, town of magic and stars, came to the fore as a matter of course.
The Global Champions Tour, and its Grand Prix of €300,000, it is above all a guarantee of the best platform that exists: quite simply the world’s top thirty, according to the FEI Rolex ranking. That says it all: all the great riders now organize their season around the “GCT”’ and talk about nothing else: “The Global Champions Tour is my priority. This circuit is the best thing that has happened to our sport”, the Irish Jessica Kuerten asserted. “It’s pure sport at its very best, with redoubtable challenges to be overcome. You go out into the arena with the same butterflies in the stomach as for a championship and I love having those butterflies before a round. That stress of competition, it makes you go grey! These competitions are splendid and show off the horse in such a good light in an ideal environment.” The world’s Number 4 is expressing roughly the same feeling as all the riders involved on this prestigious circuit. Whether it’s in Sao Paulo, Estoril or Monte Carlo, the Grand Prix is a great sporting moment every time. Cannes, with its spectacular yet tasteful setting, is no exception to the rule. Cannes is also part of the superb “France International Circuit” set up by the French Equestrian Federation.
Cannes 2008 (12, 13 and 14 June) will be all of that. And even more: Dressage will be making its debut on the French Riviera with an international 5-star competition, that is to say the very best, of course, in the International Equestrian Federation’s ranking. The program will be both opulent and stimulating and will stage this demanding discipline within a mesmerizing display of equestrian art. The program is the same as that of the Olympic Games or a final of the World Cup. With little plusses like the Grand Prix Musical Special, on the Friday evening, before the grand final, the Kür, or the Musical Freestyle here only the best eight will have the right to present themselves under the Hesperides Stadium’s lights on the Saturday at about 22:45! Revenge match of the recent World Cup final between the two divas of world dressage, Anky van Grunsven, from Holland, and Isabel Werth, from Germany? Probably! All that has still to be confirmed by the final reservations by 29 May.
Since the finest years of Paris-Bercy, Cannes is the first French event offering excellence in these two Olympic disciplines within the same arena. Three days of top-of-the-range sport where women will inevitably be in pride of place since the “Amazons” area currently riding high at the top of both world rankings! Cannes and Women, two words that have always gone well together on La Croisette.
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