The CCIO 4*-S at Lignières, in the Cher, ends this Sunday, 27 September, with the showjumping. At the end of cross-country day, the top four in the individual standings are all French, and France leads the Nations Cup on 97.5 points, 60.5 clear of Great Britain. A small rule explains that lead: the twenty penalties conceded by Thomas Carlile, the leader after the dressage, do not count towards the French total. Here is what is at stake on Sunday at Lignières, how an eventing team’s score is worked out, and why this lead will be worth nothing in four days’ time.
What is at stake on Sunday at the Lignières eventing
The international eventing competition at Lignières runs from 23 to 27 September 2026 at the Pôle du cheval et de l’âne in Lignières-en-Berry, in the Cher, some 30 miles (50 km) south of Bourges. It is organised by ACEVA, the Association des compétitions équestres du Val d’Arnon. Classes run across five levels, from the CCI*Intro to the CCI 4*-S, plus a Pro 2 class reserved for seven-year-olds.
The class that matters to France carries one more code: CCIO4*-S-NC. The O marks an official team competition, the NC letters a Nations Cup leg. Lignières is the fifth and final qualifying round of the 2026 FEI Eventing Nations Cup series, and the only one held in France. The finale fits into a single morning: the second horse inspection, then the showjumping, with the teams going last.
To place the sport, our guide to eventing explains the three tests, dressage, cross-country and showjumping, and how penalties add up from one test to the next.
On video · 120 seconds
Lignières Eventing 2026: Four French Riders Lead, and Twenty Penalties Don’t Count
At the end of cross-country day, the top four in the individual standings are French and France leads the eventing Nations Cup on 97.5 points, 60.5 ahead of Great Britain. The twenty penalties of Thomas Carlile, the leader after the dressage, do not count in that total: a team keeps only its three best scores. Here is what is at stake, and why this lead will be worth nothing on 1 October at Boekelo.
Eventing Nations Cup: France leads by 60.5 points ahead of the showjumping
In the team standings, France has 97.5 points after the cross-country. Its lead over Great Britain has grown from 13.6 points after the dressage to 60.5 points at the end of cross-country day. Italy sits third on 176.8 points, ahead of Norway on 219.8. In eventing the lowest score wins: every point is a penalty.
National team manager Jean-Luc Force picked four combinations for this home Nations Cup: Thomas Carlile and the mare Golden de Béliard AA (the AA suffix denotes an Anglo-Arab in the French naming system), Karim Florent Laghouag and Dream de Viève, Stéphane Landois and Hermès du Gévaudan, and Benjamin Massié and Figaro Fonroy. The manager openly embraced an end-of-season choice: up-and-coming horses paired with seasoned riders, and a nod to the future.
Why Thomas Carlile’s twenty penalties do not weigh on the French eventing team
The 2026 FEI series rules are explicit: a team fields three or four combinations, and only the three best scores count towards the team result. Saturday night’s arithmetic shows it to the decimal. Benjamin Massié 29.7 points, Karim Laghouag 33.5, Stéphane Landois 34.3: added together, these three scores give exactly 97.5 points, the French total. Thomas Carlile’s 53.2 points are dropped from the calculation.
Yet this rider led the competition after the dressage. His mare picked up a refusal, twenty penalties, on the way out of combination 23, right at the end of the course, which dropped him to nineteenth. He explained that the mare, who is very small, needs to be kept riding forward, and that in a combination packed with fences she did not understand which one to jump. A dropped score is not a safety net, however: it is recalculated after the showjumping, and a bad round on Sunday would reshuffle the team total.
Benjamin Massié and Figaro Fonroy, leaders of the Lignières CCIO 4*-S after the cross-country
Third after the dressage, Benjamin Massié and Figaro Fonroy took the lead of the CCIO 4*-S on 29.7 points. Their cross-country round was clear over the fences, with three seconds over the optimum time of 6 minutes 33 seconds, or 1.2 time penalties. The rider was the first French team member out, indeed the pathfinder, the one who goes without any information from the course and brings some back to his team-mates.
The round had a particular flavour: it was his first cross-country with Figaro Fonroy since the World Championships in mid-August, where the pair slipped and fell in the first third of the course, ending their competition. We previewed the French squad for those Worlds in our article on what the Bleus had to win in Aachen, and covered separately what the championship cross-country asked of the horses. On Saturday the rider said he had gone forward without testing his horse’s limits, with the main target still the CCI 5*-L at Pau at the end of October.
Six minutes thirty-three: how the cross-country clock changed the Lignières standings
The optimum time is the cross-country sorting tool. Beyond it, every second costs 0.4 of a point, and the gap widens without a single rail falling. Karim Laghouag posted one of only two clear-inside-the-time rounds of the day with Dream de Viève, crossing the line in 6 minutes 23 seconds: he climbed from thirteenth to second, on 33.5 points. Stéphane Landois finished in 6 minutes 40 seconds, or 2.8 time penalties, and sits fourth on 34.3 points, on a horse competing at this level for only the second time.
The other round inside the time came from an individual entrant, Jonas de Véricourt, a pupil of Nicolas Touzaint, riding the grey Grand Quartier, owned by Clément Hervieu-Léger, general administrator of the Comédie-Française. The pair climbed to eleventh on 40.8 points.
Four French riders in the top four places of the eventing
The individual standings before the final test put Benjamin Massié first on 29.7 points, Karim Laghouag second on 33.5, Véronique Réal third on 33.7 with Fireball, and Stéphane Landois fourth on 34.3. Eighth after the dressage, Véronique Réal added only two points on the cross-country, and she is not in the Nations Cup foursome.
The provisional podium was also shaped by two exits. Germany’s Vanessa Bölting, second after the dressage, retired with Ready to Go. Thomas Carlile went from first to nineteenth over a single fence. Between first and second, 3.8 points separate the two French riders: a little less than one rail, which is worth 4 points. In other words, the individual victory will come down to a single fault.
What to look for in an eventing horse on showjumping day
The Sunday of an eventing competition is nothing like an ordinary showjumping class. The horse ran a cross-country the day before, it jumps tired, and the leaderboard reads backwards. Here are the markers that really count when watching this last test, at Lignières or anywhere else.
What to look for in the final test of an eventing competition
- Freshness above all. The real question on Sunday is not the height of the fences, it is the horse’s condition the day after a cross-country of six and a half minutes.
- The morning vet inspection. A second inspection precedes the class: a horse presented unlevel does not jump, and its team loses the score without having cleared a fence.
- The reversed running order. The best-placed go last, and at Lignières the Nations Cup teams close the show. The pressure rises with every start.
- A rail is worth 4 points. When 3.8 points separate the top two, a single rail reverses the standings. The time allowed matters too, at 0.4 of a point per second over.
- The dropped score. With four combinations entered, a team keeps only its three best totals. The sum is redone after the jumping, not before.
- The horse’s experience. A horse at its second competition at this level and a championship horse do not respond the same way to a course at the end of the weekend.
- What the dressage says, three days earlier. The marks from the test are never wiped: they set the margin the rider is still working with on Sunday.
Sunday at Lignières: horse inspections, then showjumping at 11.15 am
The competition’s official pre-programme, dated 19 September 2026, sets out the day. The morning opens with the horse inspections, the CCI 3*-L first, the CCI 4*-S next, then the Pro 2 showjumping at 9.15 am and the CCI 2*-S cross-country at 11 am. The CCI 4*-S showjumping is scheduled for 11.15 am, with the Nations Cup teams going last from 11.30 am, starts every two minutes and two five-minute breaks.
The Nations Cup prize-giving is planned for 1 pm, on foot, followed at 1.30 pm by the CCI 4*-S ceremony, mounted. The CCI 3*-L showjumping, with sixty starters announced, follows at 2.15 pm. Eventing timetables shift with the number of horses actually presented: these are guides, not guarantees.
These vet inspections underline a simple fact: in competition, a horse’s health record has to be proven on paper. That is exactly what our horse health record brings together, with vaccinations, visits and treatments all in one place.
Lignières, the last Eventing Nations Cup leg before Boekelo
The Eventing Nations Cup is in its fourteenth season in 2026, and its format has changed. Five qualifying legs are run at CCI 4*-S: Marbach in Germany in May, Bicton in Great Britain at the end of May, Strzegom in Poland in June, Avenches in Switzerland in July and Lignières in France in September, followed by a CCI 4*-L final at Boekelo in the Netherlands from 1 to 4 October 2026.
The FEI has dropped the cumulative season ranking. Each nation may contest as many legs as it wishes, only its three best results count towards qualification, the top ten nations go through to the final, and there the counters go back to zero. In the event of a tie for qualification, the nation that has competed in more legs goes ahead. Germany arrives at the final as 2025 title-holder.
The direct consequence for the Bleus: the 60.5-point lead built on Saturday in the Cher has no value to carry forward. It is there to win a leg and secure a place, not to build a head start at Boekelo. In four days’ time, everyone starts from zero, over the long format, on a more demanding cross-country.
Lignières 2026 in numbers: 314 eventing starters in the Cher
The official pre-programme lists 314 starters across the whole event, split into six classes: 80 in the CCI 2*-S, 64 in the CCI 3*-L, 54 in the CCI 4*-S, 54 in the CCI 2*-L, 50 in the CCI*Intro and 12 in the Pro 2. The cross-country start intervals tell the hierarchy of the levels: two minutes between horses in the 2*-S and CCI*Intro, three minutes in the 4*-S, three and a half minutes in the 2*-L, four minutes in the 3*-L.
An event like this keeps a region alive as much as a sport. To find yards, clubs and professionals in the area, our equestrian directory for Centre-Val de Loire lists the establishments of the Cher and neighbouring departments, and our calendar of equestrian competitions gives the next dates open to riders.
What we still do not know about the Lignières eventing
This article was written overnight from Saturday to Sunday, before the final test, and it will not pretend to know what it does not. The showjumping has not taken place: neither the individual winner nor the winning nation of the leg is known. The final running order depends on the standings fixed after the cross-country and on the morning presentations. The result of the second horse inspection is not known either, and a single withdrawal can change the shape of a team.
The French squad for the Boekelo final had not been published at the time of writing. So we offer no prediction and no final ranking here. What can be verified are the scores fixed after the cross-country, the competition’s official pre-programme and the series rules.
Lignières eventing: the key points
The CCIO 4*-S at Lignières, in the Cher, ends this Sunday, 27 September, with the showjumping, scheduled for 11.15 am, teams last. France leads the Nations Cup on 97.5 points, 60.5 ahead of Great Britain, and the top four in the individual standings are French, with Benjamin Massié in front on 29.7 points. Thomas Carlile’s twenty penalties do not count towards the team total, because a team keeps only its three best scores. And that lead disappears on 1 October at Boekelo, where the series final resets every counter to zero.
To go further on the sport and its cousins, our guide to eventing explains how to read the three tests, our guide to showjumping details the scale of faults, and our reports on the Pompadour young horse eventing week and the Asian Games eventing show the same sport at two other scales.
Discovering eventing by following Lignières? The Equirider guide takes the sport from the start: the three tests, how penalties are calculated, the star levels and what each class asks of the horse.
Sources: Fédération Équestre Internationale (announcement of the 2026 Eventing Nations Cup format, calendar of the five legs and the final); official pre-programme of the Lignières international eventing competition dated 19 September 2026, published by ACEVA; Fédération Française d’Équitation (selection of 16 September 2026 and statements by the national team manager); GrandPrix.info (report on the 26 September 2026 cross-country, results and riders’ comments); Military Boekelo organisers for the final dates. Equirider is not affiliated with the FEI, the FFE or the competition organisers.
