How tall do the world’s best show jumping horses tend to be? Is it better to have a smaller horse or bigger horse? How tall would be deemed too tall to be efficient (is 17+hh too big)? What would you say the perfect height is?
Well Jappeloup was 15.1hh I believe. Others are 17.2hh. It depends!
There are always exceptions, but most are on the bigger side. 16.2 - 17.1 would be the most common range.
Bigger but still short-backed. Plenty of smaller horses are out there though.
I love when they overlay the first and second place round. It really seems like that technical riding and maintaining impulsion through very mindful riding of your lines makes the biggest difference. I’ve seen smaller horses with a shorter stride still win because they never bulged through a turn or had to fight to rebalance approaching a fence.
That is like asking what is the best height to be a grand prix rider :-). Over the past 15 years, I have seen the top horses become much more modern and compact. IMHO, 16.2H is the ideal height.
Shorter than you think 
while there are exceptions, bigger and smaller, courses these days favor a “mid-size” horse, lots around 16.2, more compact. While we have one very big guy, he’s a stand out dverywhere. Lots if these big guys get shuffled to eq (or puissance or six bar) because they can have more difficulty with more technical courses than your average size wb.
Myself de Breve is barely 15.1. Cortes ‘C’ is like 17-something. It varies.
Myself De Breve, as ybiaw mentioned, and Athena come to mind for smaller GP horses (Athena winning with Charlie Jayne in the irons, who is over 6ft tall I believe.) Ohlala is 15.2h and Cedric is 15.3h. Plus Coral Reef Via Volo is 15.2h.
Most horses are probably in the 16.1h-16.3h range. I think you actually see more outliers on the short side in the jumper ring than on the tall side. Someone please correct me, but I can name a ton more 15h GPs horses than 17.3h GP horses and certainly nothing in the 18h range comes to mind.
I think of Indigo, Royce, and Simon as being very big animals, but I’d be surprised if they were over 17.1. Cella too always seems big in person.
There is no “perfect” size. What matters is that your horse can do the height and has the step for the combinations. If they can do that, a smaller horse is probably going to be handier and neater where a larger horse is going to cover more ground and be faster. But even that is just a generalization.
Thats why you’ll hear top riders talking about a course “suiting” their horse or not suiting their horse. At WEF, with a certain course designer in the huge international ring, you can have a long straight run home to end a jump off. That is not going to favor a smaller horse who can’t get there fast enough to leave strides out. A different course designer might have a trappy tight roll back with an inside option to a tall plank vertical, and that will favor a handy, springy horse who can sneak inside super collected and rock back.
And Flexible is 15.3 with shoes on
Rel6 agree completely that the outliers tend to be smaller than bigger. At an FEI show I’d say maybe 15% smaller, but I can usually count the big ones on one or two hands, and one is ours.
When I attended the FEI jog at Harrisburg one year, I remember thinking how small the horses were. There were not any big warmblood types in the jog that year.
