Canada has won a two-horse race to be awarded the FEI World Equestrian Games for 2018.
Host
The FEI’s announcement today (9 June) means the Games – equestrianism’s world championships – will be held outside Europe for the second time, following the 2010 Games in Lexington, Kentucky.
The Bromont Olympic Equestrian Park, venue for the equestrian events at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, will form the stage for the World Equestrian Games in four year’s time.
“We are really delighted to award the 2018 Games to Bromont/Montreal,” said FEI President HRH Princess Haya. “The Bromont Olympic Equestrian Park is an exceptional and proven venue, and will be the ideal location for the eighth edition of the FEI World Equestrian Games, our most global equestrian event.”
Bidding again
Lexington was the other remaining bidder for WEG in 2018, but it has not been long since the city last hosted the Games.
The FEI did have to reopen the bidding process for the 2018 Games last summer, after the Canadian bid team was unable to provide the full public sector financial support required to host the Games.
It has since been confirmed that the Bromont bid committee have secured ‘substantial government backing’, which was said to be a crucial element in the decision.
At one point, Britain was mooted as a potential host of the Games in 2018, but the ‘expression of interest’ made by the British Equestrian Federation was later withdrawn.
Four years
The FEI World Equestrian Games are held every four years, in the middle of the Olympic cycle.
Previously, individual sports held their own world championships, but since 1990 the seven FEI disciplines of jumping, dressage and para-equestrian dressage, eventing, driving, endurance, vaulting and reining were all brought under the banner of the World Equstrian Games.
The inaugural FEI World Equestrian Games were hosted in Stockholm, and since then have been staged in The Hague (NED) in 1994, Rome (ITA) in 1998, Jerez (ESP) in 2002, and Aachen (GER) in 2006.
The next Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games will be held in Normandy, France from 23 August to 7 September.