Alban Poudret, ambassador for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games™ 2014 in Normandy :
Alban Poudret is the sporting director of the Geneva International Horse Show, which boasts an indoor course declared the best in the world by its riders.
As a child, Poudret set up obstacle courses in his garden, as any future rider might. The only difference: he jumped the obstacles on foot rather than on a horse, with friends filling out his start list. Today, it is with this same eagerness – but on a bigger scale – that he designs each CHI Geneva competition.
Poudret found his vocation as an equestrian journalist early on. At just fifteen, he was writing his first pieces for Cheval Magazine, L’Information Hippique and L’Eperon, to which he is still a regular contributor. He left Switzerland to spend a year in Paris, where he joined the editorial staff for these three magazines plus L’Equipe. When city life got to be too much, he returned to Switzerland, where he worked for Le Matin newspaper, followed by Radio Suisse Romande and Télévision Suisse Romande (after a stint as a consultant for FR3) and a number of foreign magazines – even as far away as Japan.
In 1982, Poudret launched the monthly Le Cavalier Romand. Since then, the magazine and its enthusiastic founder, who has written several books (Jappeloup et Milton, deux chevaux de légende and Le CHI de Genève, une histoire de passion), have become well-known names in the equestrian world. This father of two has been a speaker at numerous competitions in Switzerland and abroad (for ten years, he was the voice at the Paris-Bercy, Cannes and San Patrignano international jumping competitions and the World Equestrian Games in Rome, among others). For the past 23 years, he has served as the sport director of the CHI Geneva, one of the three legs of the new Rolex Grand Slam, sharing his fervour for the sport and for life in general.