Richard Vogel, 29, has never before been the world's top-ranked show jumper. As of the September 2026 update, he is. The German rider took over the number one spot on the Longines Rankings for the first time in his career, closing the month on 3,376 points to American Kent Farrington's 3,303 and Great Britain's Scott Brash close behind on 3,274, having climbed from fourth. "It still feels very surreal to hear that I am world number one," Vogel said in a statement released by the FEI.
Four places lower on that same list sits Switzerland's Steve Guerdat, who a few weeks earlier had won individual gold at the FEI Jumping World Championship in Aachen aboard Dynamix de Belheme, becoming the first Swiss athlete to claim that title. Vogel himself was on the German team that took gold in the same championship, alongside Marcus Ehning, Sophie Hinners, and Daniel Deusser, finishing on 4.48 penalties ahead of Belgium's silver and Great Britain's bronze.
Guerdat is the reigning World Champion. He ranks fourth. The gap between those two facts is worth sitting with, because it says less about who jumped best this year and more about what the Longines Ranking is actually built to measure.
What the Ranking Actually Counts
The points formula behind the Longines Ranking is maintained by the International Jumping Riders Club under FEI rules, and it runs on a rolling twelve-month window. A rider's total is built from their best 30 individual results earned in that window, and there is no cap on how many competitions can count toward reaching it. A rider showing constantly, across multiple horses on multiple continents, gets far more chances to bank a strong result than a rider who competes selectively and peaks for one week in Aachen.
Each result's value depends on the class it came from. Competitions are sorted into point groups running from D up to AA, with prize money used as the stand-in for how difficult a class is, a mechanism that is simple to apply consistently and hard to contest after the fact. Every class also has to clear a floor to count at all: a minimum height of 1.45 meters (4'9"). Jump lower than that, however decisive the win, and it earns nothing.
The Case for Building It This Way
There is a real argument for a system built on volume rather than a single result. One extraordinary week, even a World Championship week, can turn on a rail that stays up or a rail that does not. A ranking drawn from thirty results across a full year absorbs a bad day, an injured horse, a late scratch, in a way a single elimination format cannot. It rewards the rider who stays competitive from January through December, not only the rider who peaks once.
Prize money as the stand-in for difficulty holds up for a similar reason. The figure is public, it is fixed before the class is even jumped, and no judge can adjust it after the fact to favor a rider they like. Course-difficulty ratings, jump-off time comparisons, and other alternatives all bring a layer of subjective judgment that a prize-money threshold avoids.
The Case Against It
The cost of that design is what volume actually requires. Thirty results in twelve months, with no ceiling on entries, rewards the rider who can afford to be everywhere: several grand prix mounts in training at once, a travel budget that reaches five-star shows across continents, and the staff to manage all of it. A rider fielding one brilliant horse, built and peaked for a single World Championship, cannot out-accumulate a deeper string running a full circuit, even when that one horse jumps the best round of the year.
Prize money as a proxy for difficulty carries the same flaw from a different angle. It measures what an organizer is willing to spend, not what a track actually demands of a horse and rider. A well-sponsored show can out-rank a leaner event with a genuinely harder course, simply because its purse clears a higher point-group threshold.
A ranking built on accumulation will always crown the rider who shows the most, not necessarily the rider who jumps the best. That has not gone entirely unaddressed. The FEI reviews the Longines Ranking rules every year, with any changes taking effect each January 1, and the points formula has already been revised more than once, including a reduction in the points awarded for five-, four-, and three-star Nations Cups after riders' own representatives raised concerns about how fairly the differential reflected competition levels.
A Rating Nobody Adopted
The sport's own trade press proposed an alternative years ago. In April 2022, World of Showjumping published a model it called the Jumping Performance Rating, scoring horse-and-rider combinations on clear-round rate, a discard for rounds carrying thirteen or more faults, and placing history from one through sixteen, rather than on a class's prize money bracket. The highest possible score was a flat 100.00, with no bonus available simply for entering more classes. It never replaced the official ranking. Four years later, the FEI's system runs on the same basic architecture it did then.
The best 30 individual results in a rolling 12-month window
No cap on the number of competitions a rider can enter
Competition difficulty set by prize money, sorted into point groups from D up to AA
A 1.45-meter (4'9") minimum height for any class to count at all
A methodology reviewed annually, with changes taking effect every January 1
None of this makes Vogel's ranking a lesser achievement. Holding thirty results together across a full year, against a schedule demanding enough to keep testing a horse's soundness and a rider's nerve, is its own kind of proof. But it is a different kind of proof than the one most spectators assume they are watching when a name reaches the top of the list. For the buyer weighing a horse partly on the strength of its rider's ranking, or the trainer citing it to argue for a bigger stall at a bigger show, the number is worth reading for what it actually measures: a year of accumulated, well-funded consistency. Aachen already settled the question of who jumped best this year, and it did not answer to the same name.
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