In the city where Charlemagne was crowned, the jumping world crowned a new champion, and it was the one name missing from a collection that already had almost everything else in it.
Steve Guerdat and Dynamix de Belheme took individual gold at the FEI Jumping World Championship on 0.86 penalties, after five clear rounds across the championship and two flawless rounds on Sunday. He becomes the first Swiss athlete to win individual jumping world gold.
Belgium's Thibeau Spits took silver with Impress-K van 't Kattenheye Z on 5.60, the only other combination to jump clear in both rounds of the final. Harry Charles and LT Holst Freda took bronze on 7.17, having made the biggest move of the day, from 23rd.
L-R Thibeau Spits (BEL) - Steve Guerdat (SUI) - Harry Charles (GBR) winners of the Individual Final at the FEI World Championships Aachen 2026. Image: © FEI/Benjamin Clark
What It Completes
Guerdat arrived on Sunday as the only rider in the final field who already held an individual world championship medal, the bronze from Tryon in 2018. The rest of his record read: Olympic gold at London 2012, Olympic silver at Paris 2024, European gold at Milan 2023, and three World Cup Final titles in 2015, 2016 and 2019.
The world title was the gap. At 44, with a horse he knew he might not have an equivalent of at the next championship, he has been candid that the week was an extremely nervous one, and that the nerves only went when the last fence stayed up. His description afterwards was that he had ended up somewhere he never dreamed of.
Spits and Charles
Spits's silver is the continuation of a season that began with second place behind Richard Vogel in the Rolex Grand Prix at The Dutch Masters in March on this same stallion. He has spent 2026 being the rider who finishes just behind the winner in the biggest classes in the world, and at some point that will stop being a pattern and start being a title.
Charles's climb from 23rd to bronze, on a mare who had already delivered two championship clears in the team competition, capped an unusual week: four faults on Thursday, a redemptive clear on Friday that secured British team bronze, and then the round of the individual final on Sunday.
The Guerdat Season
Read across the whole year, this was not a surprise. Guerdat took the Derby at La Baule in June, the Derby at Dinard in August, third in the Rolex Grand Prix at Falsterbo in July, and the €1 million Rolex Grand Prix of Ireland at Dublin on 9 August, two days before the championship opened. Three weeks after Aachen he was third in the $5 million CPKC 'International' at Spruce Meadows.
A rider who described his Dublin week as horrible except for the classes that mattered spent August and September winning or podiuming in most of the biggest classes in the sport.
The Championship
Aachen 2026 ran from 11 to 23 August across six disciplines, jumping, dressage, para dressage, eventing, four-in-hand driving and vaulting, at the Soers, twenty years after the same showground hosted the 2006 World Equestrian Games. Sold-out grandstands, a rain-soaked German team gold, and a Swiss rider finally completing the set.
Boyd Exell took another driving world title in the same fortnight, which tells you something about the durability of the sport's very best.