After an eight-year absence, the FEI World Equestrian Games in effect will be back, coming to Aachen, Germany, in 2026, in all but name.
The FEI awarded world championships in jumping, dressage, para dressage, eventing, driving and vaulting to the renowned European facility Aug. 10-23 2026, with only endurance out of the mix. That will be held in Saudi Arabia that October.
The Aachen championships will be a qualifier for the 2028 Los Angeles Games in the Olympic sports and para. Buy your tickets starting Monday Nov. 20 at https://www.aachen2026.com/
Aachen was the only site bidding for all the sports but endurance. Both Burghley in England and Boekelo in the Netherlands lost bids to hold eventing separately.
Aachen hosted what is generally accepted as the best of the WEGs in 2006, attracting 576,000 spectators. Those Games also included endurance, and reining, which is no longer an FEI sport.
The WEG began as a compilation of FEI world championships in 1990, ostensibly a one-off, but that competition in Sweden was so successful the concept continued through 2018. Other WEGs were less wonderful than their debut or Aachen’s rendition, and organizers became reluctant to bid for the whole thing because of the expense and the complications of staging that number of disciplines. So in 2022, the world championships were hosted separately in several nations.
“Following the outstanding FEI World Championships 2022 organized in Denmark, Italy and the UAE (which ran the endurance),” FEI President Ingmar de Vos said after bids were received in August, “we are confident this flexible approach with single and multiple bids serves not only the sport, but also the fans and the development of equestrian around the world, allowing different nations and venues to bid to host a major FEI event.”
And then three months later, Aachen gets awarded practically the whole shebang.
Aachen knows how to do pageantry, as it demonstrated in the 2006 WEG. (Photo © 2006 by Nancy Jaffer)
“We thank the FEI for their trust,” CHIO Aachen General Manager Michael Mronz said.
“We feel honored and pleased to host, together with the German Equestrian Federation, the FEI World Championships Aachen 2026…We would like to invite the entire world of equestrian sport to Aachen so that we can celebrate an unforgettable event together in 2026.”
The awarding of the sports to Aachen and Al Ula, Saudi Arabia, “is a significant decision for the future of equestrian sport,” De Vos maintained.
“We examined every aspect of the bids we received and especially the sporting infrastructures, the conditions for the horses, accessibility and sustainability,” he said.
“The FEI is delighted to have secured such outstanding hosts for our most prestigious championships three years in advance, which allows plenty of time for preparation and planning.
“I would like to congratulate the winners, who submitted outstanding bids. We are all well aware of Aachen’s unique track record of organizing extremely successful large-scale events. We were impressed with Al Ula’s proposal, which not only contains all the components of a successful event but seeks to showcase the heritage and potential of an entire region.”
