Meet the brothers behind Faultless, showjumping’s answer to Drive to Survive

“The goal was to broaden the audience and bring in a base that might never have had any idea about the sport,” sums up Ben Asselin of Faultless, the new six-part documentary series he’s produced with his older brother, Kyle Koss.

“If you can get them attracted to a certain character, or a certain story, they’re like, ‘I had no idea that’s what it took.’

“From just the 80 seconds in the ring, you don’t see all the hard work, the setbacks, the injuries, the financial burdens that go into it – and that’s where the real stories are.”

Ben had ridden at five-star level for years. Kyle has never sat on a horse competitively in his life. Between them, they’ve produced a series following 14 of the world’s leading showjumpers across a single season, focusing mainly at venues included in the Rolex Grand Slam.

It’s made by Brighter Frame Productions and Terminal B TV, in partnership with Spruce Meadows and Rolex, and narrated by three-time Emmy nominee Walton Goggins – of The White Lotus fame. And it exists, in large part, because of a Canadian venue that has belonged to Ben and Kyle’s family for half a century.

The idea itself, though, began somewhere much more improbably, with a non-alcoholic Martini. Kyle was in Los Angeles developing said Martini – the first in the world by his reckoning – with a business partner, Danny Stepper, when the conversation turned to television.

“I asked Danny because he grew up in Hollywood and I knew he might know some people,” Kyle recalls. “I said, ‘Is there anybody you know in reality TV?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I know this guy named Tom Forman.’”

That introduction – to Tom, a veteran producer at Terminal B TV – became the backbone of the series. But the concept had been forming for longer, born at the family’s Christmas table the year before.

“As someone a little more on the outside of the sport, I was thinking how showjumping would really benefit from something similar to Drive to Survive in Formula One,” Kyle says.

He took the idea to Ben, then recovering from a ruptured spleen and easing away from top-level competition himself.

“I gave him a document, which was the treatment of the episodes,” Kyle says.

Ben brought a lifetime of contacts within the sport; Kyle brought the deal making.

“We come at it from two different places,” Kyle says. “Ben being the athlete and I'm kind of just the observer. But I have more of the business background. It was a massive challenge because we’d never produced a TV show before. But I’d never made a Martini either!”

Scratch beneath the motivations behind the decision to make the show, and Spruce Meadows is usually somewhere underneath it. Their grandfather founded the venue, drawing on Europe’s best when he built it.

“He learnt a lot from European venues like Hickstead and Aachen,” Ben says.

Kyle adds: “He wanted a facility where North Americans also had an opportunity to compete on an international stage. It was part of a broader ambition, too – to put the sport in front of an audience that had never had a reason to watch it before.”

Faultless is a continuation of that ambition.

“We were representing our own brand, in Spruce Meadows. We were representing the Rolex Grand Slam. But we were also representing all these different venues that have been around for longer than we have,” Ben says. “And we didn’t build those, right? So it was a huge responsibility.”

The timing sharpened that further. Faultless was shot during Spruce Meadows’ 50th anniversary year, against the backdrop of a $5m grand prix prize purse and a Rolex Grand Slam bid that handed the season a ready-made narrative arc before a single camera began rolling.

Faultless isn’t the first attempt to bring cameras into the world of elite equestrian sport. But for Ben there’s a reason why most of those attempts missed the mark. He recalls hearing from the Whitaker family about previous approaches.

“Even speaking with the Whitaker boys, there have been numerous times where a production crew has tried to come in and film that. And they just want to go and film them at the bar or get into the drama of their families. And that’s something that we really wanted to stray away from.”

The brothers looked instead to Drive to Survive for a template – and, tellingly, to what they felt other equestrian-adjacent documentaries had got wrong.

“We found that the other equestrian docuseries that were out didn’t necessarily capture the actual top level of sport, per se – focusing more on the lifestyle around the sport,” Ben says. “We wanted to have something that resembled the same level of respect for the sport that our venue at Spruce Meadows did.”

Kyle picks up the same point from a different angle, pointing to the range of riders the series actually follows.

“You’ve got a Steve Guerdat, a Martin Fuchs – dialled in, but even the difference between those two is quite substantial. And then you go from a Lillie Keenan to a Kyle King, completely different backgrounds. But they all share the same goal.”

A few decades ago, equestrian sport was something of a regular fixture on mainstream British television. These days, you’re more likely to spot a horse on a fashion runway than in the ring. Fashion houses have leaned hard into equestrian imagery for the Year of the Horse and Rupert Campbell-Black has galloped onto the small screen in Hulu’s adaptation of Rivals – yet the sport itself is barely visible at all. It raises the question: does equestrian media need to start telling new stories?

“I wanted to make something that I wanted to watch,” Kyle says, “because in some cases it can be a bit boring to watch 30 riders go around the ring. But it can also be a bit boring to watch a Formula One race for 90 laps.”

His argument isn’t that the sport lacks material.

“There’s so much there that you can unpack and create a real narrative around what this actually is that people just don’t see. I think there’s a real potential for all horse media, for all horse sport, to take it and say, you know what, this is a special thing.

“You’ve got men and women competing against each other on an equal playing field. You’ve got people coming from all walks of life, not just people that had tonnes of money growing up.”

Irish rider Daniel Coyle's story, told across episode five, is his go-to example.

"He talks about how he couldn't read or write,” he says. “There wasn’t that much opportunity for somebody like that. And he's now made himself one of the top athletes in the sport.”

Ben adds: “A lot of the time in the equestrian industry, we’re always marketing to ourselves. To actually educate people on what's going on, you have to open up the doors to it. I feel like a lot of the time we hide too much and then you try to just show the best things about it, but that's not reality.”

Kyle, for all his self-described distance from the sport, makes an animated case for why the horse’s place in the world deserves much more screen time. He traces it back to their own upbringing in western Canada, along the old Cowboy Trail.

“The horse was the real key component to that,” he says, of his province’s development. “We wouldn’t have anything without horses. And you know, my grandfather knew that.”

Of course, equestrian sport is under increased scrutiny at the moment when it comes to its social licence to operate, and Ben is conscious of that pressure without letting it make him cagey. His instinct runs the other way – show more, not less, on the theory that the reality holds up better than people assume.

He stresses how he was keen to show how the horses in Faultless have their “diets dialled in”, their “exercise programmes dialled in”, their “mental wellbeing dialled in” – they’re full-time athletes with full-time support staff, not animals wheeled out on competition weekends.

But none of which means the series flinches from risk. Spruce Meadows has form here. The venue used to run a YouTube series called Thrills and Spills, which showed the sport’s worst falls alongside its biggest wins, and Ben says that same instinct carried over into Faultless. Martin Fuchs’ serious fall at Spruce Meadows, mid-Grand Slam bid, makes the final cut.

“You can’t write that. You can’t script any of that. But you also see that now he’s back and he’s winning again.”

Getting riders to hand over their worst days, as well as their best, took more than a good pitch – it took Ben’s own standing in the sport.

“There was a lot of social capital on the line – a lot of relationships that mean a lot to us,” he says. “I think the confidence from the riders came from the longstanding relationship that our family has had with the sport.”

Both brothers insist nothing was staged for effect.

“We were not telling people, go over and talk to this person. We were not manufacturing storylines,” Kyle says. “We took the footage that we had and that footage created the storylines that we followed naturally.”

Riders were mic’d from a distance rather than crowded by a crew, and some, Ben adds, “forgot they had a mic on.”

Neither brother sounds like someone planning to stop at one season. Ben flags Richard Vogel’s live bid to become only the second rider ever to complete the Rolex Grand Slam – after Scott Brash – as unfinished business the series is well placed to follow. But Kyle doesn't dress up the economics.

“We’re not making money out of this,” he says. “It was a large investment. But we think that in time, it will be a good investment – not just for us personally, but for the sport in general. If it can broaden the audience base, it really lifts everybody up.”

Whether Faultless genuinely does for showjumping what Drive to Survive did for Formula One is still an open question. But the brothers have put themselves at the front of the queue for reimagining what equestrian media could look like.