Two in three show jumping horses are foreign: how international is show jumping in Italy

How "international" is show jumping in Italy? On our sample of 8,861 profiles of horses with public results, the answer is clear: two horses in three are foreign. It is one of our most solid figures, because nationality is known for 99% of profiles (unlike pedigree, which is far patchier).

In short

• Sample: 8,861 show jumping horses with results in Italy; nationality known for 99%.
• Only 33% are Italian: 67% are of foreign registration.
• Main foreign origins: Germany (14.5%), Belgium (11.8%), France (10.4%), Netherlands (9.6%).
• Robust figure: nationality is among the most complete fields in the collection.
• Data free to cite with attribution to HorseReport.ai.

Where the horses come from

Italy remains the single largest nationality, but on its own does not reach a third. The rest is dominated by Europe's sport-horse breeding powerhouses.

What it means

The picture confirms a strong reliance on imports: Italian show jumping is largely fed by horses bred and registered abroad — chiefly in Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands — the same regions that dominate the ranking of the most common sires (see our study on studbooks and sires). For buyers and sellers, it is a market where foreign origin is the norm, not the exception.

And, paradoxically, precisely what matters most — the genealogy — is the hardest thing to find publicly: we cover it in our data accessibility study. Browse the horses.

Methodology

Analysis of a sample of 8,861 profiles of show jumping horses with public results in Italy, collected from equiresults.com (FISE-circuit competitions), extracted in June 2026. This is not a representative sample of the FISE population, but the collection that powers the HorseReport.ai information pages. "Nationality" is the horse's country of registration, used as a proxy for origin (foreign vs Italian); it is resolved for 99% of profiles. The data may be cited with attribution to HorseReport.ai.