The London International Horse Show runs at ExCeL from Thursday 17 to Monday 21 December 2026, three FEI World Cup qualifiers across the five days.
The show was known for most of its life as the Olympia London International Horse Show, after the west London hall it filled every December until 2020. It moved to ExCeL in 2021, taking with it the format that made it: six days of top-level competition in the week before Christmas, run by the HPower Group under Simon Brooks-Ward. It hosts the British legs of the international federation’s World Cup qualifiers in showjumping and driving.
Indoor showjumping is a different sport from the summer version. The arena is small, the turns are tight and the fences come up quickly, which rewards a horse that can shorten and a rider who can think in a confined space, and the crowd is close enough to hear the poles rattle. The puissance, in which the wall is raised until only one horse clears it, is the class the whole week is built towards.
The 2026 show runs from Thursday 17 to Tuesday 22 December at ExCeL London, with more than four hundred horses and ponies. Between the championship classes sit the Shetland pony Grand National and a dog agility competition, which is not a joke and is one of the best-attended parts of the programme. It is a Christmas outing before it is a horse show, and most of the competition is broadcast or streamed for those who would rather watch it warm.