Dressage needs to answer harder questions than just ‘who did what in the warm-up’ to secure its future

H&H’s dressage editor Oscar Williams considers the challenges facing elite dressage, why similar issues are being raised time after time, and what needs to happen to achieve real and lasting change

Footage of Charlotte Dujardin warming up in Amsterdam, circulated online in recent weeks, has produced a now-familiar sequence: a short video goes viral, experts comment, outrage builds, and the sport finds itself, once again, performing concern.

A recent article in The Times followed that pattern. A World Horse Welfare spokesperson said the video was “a hard watch”, with “clear signs of tension and conflict behaviour”.

That assessment matters, of course. But what matters more – and what rarely follows – is clarity about what should actually change.

Charlotte makes for convenient headlines. But several riders were filmed riding a horse forward into a restricting rein in the same warm-up.

And that isn’t uncommon. Variations of this can be seen across disciplines and levels of competition.

That’s not to excuse, but to illustrate, that to treat this as a story about individual conduct is rather reductive – and avoids much harder questions.

Charlotte wasn’t deemed to have broken any rules. But when The Times put a series of direct questions to the British Equestrian Federation – whether her riding met their standards, whether it represented a good example of welfare, whether they would be happy for pupils to be taught this way – none of those questions were answered.

The explanation offered was that four minutes of footage from a 45-minute warm-up made an accurate assessment impossible. That might be technically true. It doesn’t read as confidence in the sport’s own standards though.

Part of the difficulty is that the rules themselves create room for evasion. The FEI General Regulations prohibit the use of spurs “excessively” or “persistently” – but in practice, this is left to the interpretation of individual stewards.

But the deeper problem is structural. Riders ride the way judges reward. They’re responding rationally to what wins.

So, if we deem the riding seen in Amsterdam as genuinely contrary to the principles of the sport, then the question is not only why riders were doing it, but why the incentives that produce it have been left unchanged.

Focusing on Charlotte allows the sport to treat this as a problem of individual conduct rather than a problem of incentives.

And if we do that, the story fades – as it always does. The next video surfaces – as it always does. And nothing changes.

Is dressage at risk?

The comments section under The Times piece contained a familiar refrain: calls for dressage to be banned.

It’s worth addressing briefly – not because I believe the argument is strong, but because it tends to set the emotional temperature of these debates before the more useful conversation can begin.

I don’t believe a ban will happen. The threshold for prohibition in equine sport has never been a welfare concern alone – if it were, racing would already be under existential threat.

Horseracing generates £4.1 billion annually and employs hundreds of thousands of people, yet has not been banned despite a significantly higher horse fatality rate. That tells you something about how these decisions are actually made – on economic, cultural, and political grounds as much as welfare ones.

It extends beyond Britain too. Across Europe, the horse sector generates more than €100 billion in annual economic impact and supports around 400,000 jobs.

There’s also a deeper irony in the framing of elite dressage horses as unregulated victims. FEI horses are subject to rigorous passport requirements, mandatory vaccination protocols, prohibited substance testing, and international disease surveillance.

Compared to the average horse, they’re among the most closely monitored horses in existence.

A more credible risk than abolition is increased oversight. When a sport’s own regulatory framework leaves visible gaps, it tends to invite others to fill them.

This is starting to happen in parts of Europe. Danish MEP Niels Fuglsang has been a persistent voice pushing for tougher EU-level oversight of horse welfare.

And yet, for now, the political priority is elsewhere. In President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen’s, mission letters to both the Commissioner for Agriculture and Food and the Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare, horses aren’t mentioned once; the Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare has been explicitly tasked with modernising EU animal welfare rules – but the mandate focuses on farm animals, exotic imports, and food safety.

The infrastructure for EU-level intervention exists; the political will to apply it to equestrian sport doesn’t yet. When the MEP Horse Group met with von der Leyen this month, the headline policy discussion centred on simplifying the Single Market for equine mobility and trade – welfare reform wasn’t the focus.

The picture, then, is of a sector large enough to attract political attention, but not yet facing the kind of sustained legislative pressure that would force the sport’s hand. That window may not stay open indefinitely.

But welfare reform doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every viral video is also a relevance problem – it makes dressage harder to sell to new audiences, sponsors, and broadcasters at exactly the moment the sport needs to be attracting them.

The governance reality

I’ve spoken to enough people within the FEI to know that genuine will to reform exists. But their structure for rule changes inhibits these intentions.

Changing the rules of international equestrian sport is a slow and structured process by design. Proposals must be submitted by national federations, reviewed by technical committees, circulated for feedback, redrafted, and ultimately voted on at the FEI General Assembly – often many months after the issue that prompted them has already faded from public attention.

Even when a proposal passes, new rules typically only come into force the following year.

The voting structure compounds this. Each national federation carries equal weight, meaning that for dressage purposes, Germany, which won every Olympic team gold medal between 1984 and 2008, has the same vote as countries without a single FEI dressage rider.

Consensus across that breadth of membership is difficult to build quickly, and radical change is harder still.

More significantly, the core dressage rulebook is only subject to full revision on a four-year cycle – the most recent being this year.

Outside that window, amendments are generally limited to urgent welfare concerns, technical corrections, or unintended consequences in existing rules – which means the sport’s capacity to respond to a fast-moving public debate is structurally constrained even when the will is there.

Also, the rules that do emerge from urgent welfare concerns aren’t always as robust as they appear. A regulation introduced in July 2025 prohibiting substances used to induce foaming around a horse’s mouth is a case in point: the welfare intention is clear, but the enforceability is not.

If an athlete challenged such a ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the burden of proof on the FEI would be considerable. One imagines the steward’s report making for interesting reading – at what point does conscientious welfare oversight become a taste test?

Good intentions written into vague rules have a habit of being tested – and failing.

This context matters for understanding why the same debates recur without resolution. Riders, owners, and administrators who want change may find themselves working within a system that processes reform in years rather than months.

What real change might look like

Despite the structural difficulties, change is not impossible – and some of it doesn’t require waiting for the FEI’s four-year cycle.

Minimum standards for turnout, licensing requirements for riding centres and instructors, and checks on unregulated breeding would establish a welfare baseline that currently doesn’t exist – the kind of oversight applied to livestock, but largely absent for horses kept outside agricultural contexts.

That will not be cost-free, and poorly designed regulation could make an already inaccessible sport more so. But horse sport’s accessibility problem predates any proposed regulation.

Done well, a licensing framework could actually stabilise the riding centres on which grassroots participation depends – and any serious regulatory agenda would need to be paired with investment, grants, and pathways that treat participation as a public good rather than a private privilege.

None of this is imminent. But regulation has always been one of the most effective drivers of cultural shift – seatbelt laws changed not just behaviour but attitudes to road safety; smoking legislation did the same.

Minimum standards for how horses are kept, handled, and bred would, over time, reshape what people consider normal and acceptable, long before anyone reaches a competition arena.

Within the sport itself, the most meaningful changes would target incentives directly.

Judging criteria that explicitly reward visible relaxation and softness – rather than simply penalising obvious resistance – would begin to shift what riders train for. In the longer term, introducing coefficients that weight marks against observable conflict behaviour during a test would make welfare a structural part of how dressage is scored.

Stronger steward authority in warm-up arenas, with agreed behavioural indicators triggering intervention rather than individual discretion, would close the gap between the rules as written and the rules as applied.

And a mandatory welfare education requirement for riders returning from sanctions, as Richard Davison argued in his most recent H&H column, would signal that rehabilitation is taken seriously rather than managed as a reputational inconvenience.

These aren’t radical propositions. Other sports have made harder changes under less pressure.

The honesty problem

Dressage has always sold itself on a particular image. The horse is willing. The aids are invisible. The partnership is harmonious. That image is part of what makes the sport appealing – and part of what makes these moments so damaging when they surface.

Writing in Grandprix in response to the Amsterdam footage, Timothée Peugnot and Lucas Tracol make an important point about the narratives the sport constructs around itself.

After a crisis, the next up-and-coming star is always positioned as a saviour, like Charlotte once was – presented as proof that the sport’s values are intact.

The problem is that this places impossible expectations on individuals and sets them up to fail the moment they fall short. It also lets the sport avoid the harder conversation about why the crisis happened in the first place.

But elite sport is physically demanding, mentally pressurised, and full of competitive incentive. Pretending otherwise doesn’t protect the sport’s reputation – it undermines it.

When the gap between the image and the reality becomes visible, the damage is worse precisely because the image was so carefully maintained.

As Anna Ross has written, the sport is frequently unwilling to look critically at itself – and too much of the content produced around it retreats into safe, uncritical celebration rather than honest engagement.

What does good welfare actually mean?

Every governing body will tell you that horse welfare is their number one priority. But it’s worth asking what that actually means – because good welfare and elite sport exist in a tension that nobody in the industry likes to acknowledge directly.

A horse in perfect welfare is, by most definitions, an animal that is calm, free from pain, able to express natural behaviour, and not subject to significant stress.

A horse competing at the top level is asked to perform movements of considerable physical and mental demand, in an environment of noise and pressure, under a rider responding to competitive incentive.

Those two descriptions aren’t straightforwardly compatible.

That doesn’t mean elite equestrian sport is inherently abusive. But it does mean that the question “what is good welfare?” cannot be answered without first acknowledging that sport and welfare exist on a spectrum.

My own view is that good welfare and horse sport aren’t inherently incompatible, even if they are in tension. Horses can be asked to do things they wouldn’t choose to do, and may not particularly enjoy, without that constituting poor welfare – provided it causes no lasting harm and their overall quality of life is good.

But that isn’t a condition we can assume is always met. The burden of demonstrating it sits entirely with the humans involved, which is precisely why clearer standards, rather than individual discretion, matters.

It’s also why the sport needs to engage seriously with the growing body of equine stress research, rather than waiting for the science to become undeniable.

What level of physical demand on a horse is tolerable? What does pressure look like when it crosses a line?

Until the sport is willing to engage with that honestly – not defensively, not with reassuring language about harmony and partnership, but with genuine precision about what it asks of horses and why – it’ll keep having the same argument.

For me, pressure isn’t the same as suffering. A horse that is tense in a warm-up, above the bit, showing conflict behaviour, isn’t necessarily being abused. The threshold sits somewhere around this: riding that produces sustained, unresolved conflict behaviour – where the horse’s signals are consistently overridden rather than addressed – has crossed a line.

The question stewards, judges, and federations need to ask then is not “is this horse tense?” but “is this tension being listened to?” – and, critically, how do we assess that in practice.

That isn’t a rhetorical question. It requires agreed behavioural indicators, trained officials, and the institutional will to act on what they observe. The tools exist. The framework does not.

The people inhibiting change are not indifferent to horses – most of them have dedicated their lives to these animals, which is precisely what makes this hard.

But what the sport owes them – and itself – is the honesty to keep asking these questions as a matter of ongoing habit, not in response to a video, not in a carefully worded statement.

Whether it’s capable of that is, genuinely, unclear.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Where do you think the line sits between acceptable training pressure and poor welfare – and do you think the sport is currently on the right side of it? Write in and share your views at hhletters@futurenet.com, including your name, nearest town and county, for the chance to have your response published in a future issue of Horse & Hound.

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