The Word the Rulebook Won't Say: FEI and Hyperflexion

On July 6, entries close for the FEI World Championships in Aachen, the single largest gathering of Olympic disciplines outside the Games themselves. It arrives in a year the FEI is doing something it does rarely: rewriting its dressage rulebook from the ground up. Buried inside that revision, raised at the FEI Sports Forum in Lausanne this spring, was a plain request from Poland's national federation: add hyperflexion, by name, to Article 142 of the General Regulations, the FEI's own list of practices it defines as abuse.

The FEI said no. Not a permanent no — a not yet. "The FEI does not support the proposal," the federation responded, according to reporting on the Sports Forum session. "Given all the current working groups, studies and action plan on horse welfare, any potential change should be carefully assessed and reviewed, taking into account all elements. Therefore, the FEI suggest to wait until we have more information and outcome on said studies and working groups to then potentially suggest changes as part of next year's Rules revision process."

The Word That Isn't in the Rulebook

Here is what makes that answer worth sitting with: the studies the FEI is waiting on already exist, and the federation has been citing its own concern about hyperflexion in public since 2010. What has never existed, in sixteen years, is the word itself inside the document that governs a dressage steward's actual authority. Search the FEI Dressage Sport Rules, the General Regulations, the Veterinary Regulations, or the online FEI Dressage Judging Manual for "hyperflexion," and it is not there. Neither is a defined threshold for what the sport, colloquially, still calls rollkur.

That gap is not an oversight. It is the position. A federation can condemn a training method in a press statement and decline to write it into the rule its own officials are asked to enforce — and both of those things can be true on the same afternoon.

Condemned in 2010, Redefined the Same Breath

The condemnation dates to a specific video: Swedish rider Patrik Kittel warming up Watermill Scandic at a show in Odense, Denmark, with the horse's neck drawn deep and back against visible resistance, footage that circulated publicly and forced the FEI's hand. The federation's response that year did two things at once. It announced that hyperflexion achieved "through aggressive force" was unacceptable and instructed stewards to use yellow cards to prevent it. And in the same statement, it carved out room for flexion achieved without that force — the technique often called low, deep, and round — as permissible, without ever specifying how a steward at C, mid-test, is meant to tell the two apart in real time.

Fifty-Eight Studies, One Dissenter

The research the FEI says it is still waiting on has, in fact, been accumulating for two decades. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Scientific Reports, led by Uta König von Borstel with Kathrin Kienapfel, Andrew McLean, Cristina Wilkins, and the veterinary behavior researcher Paul McGreevy, gathered every peer-reviewed study published on hyperflexion to date — fifty-eight of them. At least twenty-eight concluded, in the reviewers' own terms, that the horse's welfare was actively impaired: elevated cortisol and heart rate, pharyngeal narrowing that compromises breathing, and conflict behaviors — tail swishing, head tossing, teeth grinding — that ethologists treat as evidence a horse is working through discomfort rather than around it. Only one of the fifty-eight, a 2006 Dutch study on elite dressage horses, found the position potentially beneficial, reporting lower acute stress markers during training in that specific sample. It is a real, peer-reviewed finding, and the fair-minded version of this argument gives it its due — a single result should not be waved away because it is inconvenient. But one study standing against twenty-eight is not an open question. It is a minority report.

The kinematic case against the position predates even that count. Dr. Hilary Clayton, who held the Mary Anne McPhail Dressage Chair in Equine Sports Medicine at Michigan State University's College of Veterinary Medicine from 1997 until 2014, spent much of that tenure building the biomechanical record on head-and-neck position in Grand Prix dressage horses, work that helped establish how far modern competition posture had drifted from horses' natural carriage — the same drift the FEI's own condemnation was written to address.

What Enforcement Actually Looks Like

If the science were genuinely unsettled, a cautious rulebook would make sense. The enforcement data argue otherwise. An analysis of FEI warning-card data from November 2024 through October 2025, published by The EQuerry Magazine, found that dressage events received a yellow card in roughly 3 percent of cases, against 6 percent in Jumping and 32 percent in Eventing — and that of the yellow cards issued across all three disciplines in that window, none in Dressage were attributed to Abuse of the Horse, compared with half of Jumping's and 84 percent of Eventing's. Eventing, notably, has issued yellow cards specifically for rollkur-style hyperflexion. Dressage has not issued one.

Reporting by veteran equestrian journalist Pippa Cuckson adds the texture behind that gap: dressage handed down roughly ten yellow cards across all of 2024 and had issued only two by the point of her reporting in 2025, fewer than any comparably scrutinized discipline, and none of them publicly identified by rider name or specific violation. At the Paris Olympics, FEI head veterinarian Dr. Goran Akerstrom told journalists that several dressage riders had been privately warned over "blue tongue" incidents during Grand Prix competition — a form of cyanosis veterinary researchers attribute to bit and noseband pressure restricting blood flow to the tongue. None of those riders has ever appeared on a published warning list.

The Case That Named It Anyway

The clearest evidence that the FEI already believes hyperflexion is disciplinable, word or no word, sits in its own case files. In its formal proceedings against dressage rider Cesar Parra, the FEI cited hyperflexion by name among the abusive training methods alleged — inside a legal filing, if not inside the rule a steward carries into the ring on an ordinary Tuesday. A federation willing to name the practice when prosecuting one rider, and unwilling to name it in the regulation every rider is measured against, is not managing scientific uncertainty. It is managing exposure.

Why the Jumper Ring Should Be Watching

It would be easy for a hunter/jumper reader to file this under someone else's discipline. The stewards, the yellow-card ladder, and the federation's welfare credibility are not discipline-specific — they are the same architecture your own jumper round is judged under the moment you enter under an FEI flag, and the same reputation warmblood buyers are underwriting every time they invest in the sport's judgment about what is humane. Aachen will draw the world's best horses into that same rulebook next month. The question worth asking before the first test isn't whether hyperflexion is harmful. Twenty-eight studies already answered that. It's how long a federation gets to call something abuse in public and decline to write it down.