All winter and spring, we’ve been anticipating the FEI World Cup Finals coming to Las Vegas, anticipation that’s climaxing with this effort, our first World Cup Preview Issue. Why? Because it’s a tremendous feat (partly logistically, but mostly politically) for the organizers to be running the show jumping and dressage finals concurrently for the first time, and because it’s a rare opportunity for Americans to measure ourselves, at home, against most of the best horses and riders in the world.

Today, thanks to telecommunications (especially TV and the Internet) and the relative ease of international travel, we Americans don’t feel nearly as isolated as we used to. But an ocean still separates us from Europe, at least in horse sports. That’s not all bad, but that separation (along with our own nation’s geographical breadth) makes it very difficult for our best riders and horses to compete against the best from abroad–or even against each other.

So, unless U.S. riders head to Europe, they’re rarely competitively stretched, rarely pushed to expand their training, in the way that Ludger Beerbaum, Rodrigo Pessoa, Nick Skelton, Anky van Grunsven, Ulla Salzgeber and Isabell Werth are every month or more. These folks absolutely must keep expanding their competitive and training horizons, because that’s what it takes to win a big check or a car in places like Aachen or Stockholm.

Show jumping riders and course designers co-exist in a never-ending dance, and what Guilherme Jorge builds in Las Vegas will directly influence courses around the world this year, just as courses from other major championships always have. Most people would argue that we reached the limit on how high horses can jump decades ago. In fact, since the 1984 Olympics, the fences have been smaller than in the ’60s and ’70s, which were basically a test of scope, courage, and endurance. Now designers like Jorge, Leopoldo Palacios, Linda Allen and others rely on increasing the technical and gymnastic demands through where they place the fences, usually throwing in optical questions that still test the courage and the trust between horse and rider.

But even riders who solve the designer’s puzzles in the first round are far from guaranteed a victory. Rarely is a grand prix decided without a jump-off, and to win that riders have to figure out how to shave 0.1 second off their rivals’ times.

Dressage is also limited by nature–no one’s going to invent a new gait for a horse, although they have created new movements like the piaffe pirouette, the passage half-pass and the double canter pirouette. That’s because riders are constantly trying to increase their horses’ expression (the collection, the lifting, the extension) at the walk, trot and canter. And they’re forever searching for new, better ways to express music in concert with those gaits, to make transitions from movement to movement even more seamlessly fluid. In Las Vegas, we’ll get to judge whether we like the new emphasis on this fluid work with the music or prefer the more gymnastically demanding work that Debbie McDonald, in particular, used to do (see pp. 38 and 66).

Top international competitors are constantly worrying, constantly asking themselves, their trainers, their advisors or their partners how to do what they’re doing better than they’re doing it now. That’s the significance of this World Cup Final to us Americans. It gives us, as competitors (at every level), a chance to glimpse the brilliance of the people whom our top international riders are constantly measuring themselves against. And it should be a hell of a show too.