FEI HORSE CONDITIONG TASK FORCE MEETS

On 29 June 2026, the FEI’s newly formed Horse Condition Task Force held its first working session at FEI headquarters in Lausanne. Representatives from across the sport agreed that welfare should sit at the centre of any new rules on blood, though the meeting produced no concrete rule changes and no timeline for when any might arrive.

Where this started

At the Paris 2024 Olympics, Brazilian showjumper Pedro Veniss was eliminated from the team competition after marks were found on his horse Nimrod de Muze’s flank following a clear round. Because the Olympic team format no longer allows a dropped score, Brazil’s team result was voided entirely. The incident, and others like it, pushed blood rules into the open as a live welfare and fairness debate across disciplines, where the consequences for a rider had varied sharply depending on which sport they competed in.

Federations and stakeholder groups spent much of 2025 arguing over how to fix this. The International Jumping Riders Club asked for a distinction between minor, no-fault incidents (a horse catching a flank on a wing of a fence, for example) and more serious cases, along with a warning card system. What the FEI Board actually approved at the November 2025 General Assembly went further: it replaced automatic elimination for blood on a horse’s flank with a discretionary system left to officials on the day, under new jumping rule Article 259.

Reception

The change did not land well. It was approved against the explicit recommendation of the FEI’s own Welfare Group, and several major jumping nations, including Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Sweden and Denmark, are understood to have voted against it. World Horse Welfare and the International Society for Equitation Science had both cautioned against loosening the rule before the vote. Equine behaviourist Dr Andrew McLean, an FEI advisor, went further, describing the new article on social media as “a very backward step.”

The backlash caught the FEI off guard, arriving in the final weeks before the vote rather than during the fourteen months the changes had been under discussion, and it is that backlash, more than the Paris incident itself, that produced the task force now trying to clean things up.

29th June

The first meeting was moderated by an independent facilitator, senior barrister Jonathan Taylor KC, and brought together FEI Board Members, Technical Committee and Regional Group Chairs, the Veterinary and Athletes’ Committees, National Federations, Officials and other stakeholder groups. The discussion covered how current blood rules differ across disciplines (dressage still carries automatic elimination, jumping now does not) and reviewed the rule change proposals submitted by national federations ahead of the 1 March 2026 deadline.

FEI President Ingmar De Vos opened the session by noting that the task force “reflects the commitment we made at the FEI General Assembly last year.” The outcome was consensus on principle: that welfare belongs at the centre of the discussion, and that existing rules for serious cases of abuse are already strong. Nobody on the record disputed that, but what is still unresolved is exactly what counts as a minor incident, who decides in the moment, and whether jumping’s more forgiving approach should be pulled back toward dressage’s stricter one, or the other way round.

What happens next

The FEI Board will now discuss the outcome of the meeting and decide on next steps. No date has been set for recommendations, and any harmonised framework would still need approval at a future General Assembly, which typically sits near the end of the calendar year. There is no confirmation this will be resolved in time to apply to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, only that it might be.

The honest read

This meeting suggests another step forward but it was not a rule change, and reiterating the ‘language of consensus, welfare at the centre, existing rules being strong’, is the ‘easy’ part of this process for the FEI. Everyone already agreed on those same principles before Article 259 was introduced. The test the FEI actually failed last year was not on principle but on process: a change was pushed through against its own welfare advisors with limited public warning. Whether this task force represents a genuine correction or simply a more carefully managed rollout of the same instinct will depend entirely on what reaches the General Assembly floor, and how openly it gets there.

Source note: FEI, via World of Showjumping, Horse Sport, Dressage-News, Eurodressage, Horse & Hound and HorsesDaily. Published 30 June 2026.