On July 13, US Equestrian announced that it has acquired an ownership stake in EquiRatings, the Irish data and analytics company whose numbers have quietly governed a piece of this sport for a decade: which horses get pulled from cross-country before triumph turns into tragedy, and which storylines get told about how safe the sport has become. The deal was structured through a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary and funded, the Federation says, from the profits of its own investment portfolio rather than membership dues or entry fees. It is also, whether anyone intended it this way, a governing body buying equity in the company that grades it.
What EquiRatings Actually Measures
EquiRatings was founded by Irish event rider Sam Watson and former commercial lawyer Diarmuid Byrne as, by most accounts, the first dedicated data analytics company built specifically for equestrian sport. Its signature product, the EquiRatings Quality Index, assigns each horse a numeric, traffic-light-coded score between 0 and 1 at every level it competes, an estimate of the likelihood that horse completes cross-country without a fall. The number is not decorative. In its first season of use, in 2016, Eventing Ireland's national two-star level saw cross-country falls drop 66 percent year-over-year, a result striking enough that the FEI signed its own multi-year partnership with EquiRatings shortly after, building the index into the FEI database beginning at the four-star level, with British Eventing, the USEA, and Equestrian Australia adopting versions of the same system. That same company is now also the engine behind the US Equestrian Open, the Federation's flagship series across dressage, eventing, and jumping, supplying the leaderboards, fan guides, and weekly editorial coverage around a jumping final that carries a $750,000 grand prix and more than a million dollars in prize money across the series. This is not a niche vendor. It is the numbers people, for the whole discipline, in both directions, safety and spectacle alike.
That is precisely why an ownership stake in this particular company is not the same kind of story as a federation buying into any other vendor.
The Federation's Case, Taken Seriously
Steelman it before arguing with it. US Equestrian's position is not unreasonable. EquiRatings has been its Official Data and Insights Partner for years already; this is a deepening of an existing relationship, not a hostile takeover of a stranger. CEO Bill Moroney called EquiRatings "one of the most important partners in our sport," an investment he says "secures that value for the long term." The Federation says the money came from investment income, not from the fees riders and horses already pay to compete. EquiRatings, for its part, says it will keep operating independently out of its base in Carlow, Ireland, under its own leadership, serving a client list that still includes federations Moroney does not control: the FEI, British Eventing, and Equestrian Australia among them. If EquiRatings quietly inflated safety numbers to flatter its new part-owner, it would be risking the credibility that makes it valuable to every one of those other clients too. That is a real check, not a hypothetical one.
Who Rates the Raters
A risk score is only worth anything if nobody who benefits from a favorable answer has a hand anywhere near the scale that produces it. That is not a novel insight; it is the entire, expensively learned lesson of the credit rating agencies that priced mortgage bonds ahead of 2008, where Moody's and S&P were paid by the very issuers whose debt they rated, an arrangement financial regulators and post-crisis analysis have since identified as a structural conflict that helped inflate ratings on securities that were, in fact, far riskier than advertised. Equestrian sport does not have to imagine its way into an analogous problem. A 2024 scoping review in the Equine Veterinary Journal, led by Kate Allen at the University of Bristol with colleagues Lynley Anderson, Mike King, and Siobhan Mullan, went looking specifically for the ethical fault lines running through equine sports medicine, and found that competing interests, one party holding two or more duties that can quietly pull against each other, were among the most consistently identified problems in the field. A federation that both governs a sport and now holds equity in the company scoring that sport's risk has built exactly the structure that research describes, regardless of how carefully the people involved intend to behave inside it.
The Industry Next Door Already Wrote the Fix
Equestrian sport does not even have to look outside its own barn aisle for a working precedent. American Thoroughbred racing spent years running this experiment the hard way, state commissions and industry bodies policing the safety and integrity of races run at their own tracks, with results that included a spike in fatal breakdowns at Santa Anita in 2019 and a federal indictment of individuals for systematically doping racehorses. Congress's answer was not a stronger promise of good behavior. It was the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, a body whose nine-member board is required by statute to seat five directors from entirely outside the racing industry, specifically so the entity setting safety rules is not the entity whose commercial interests those rules might inconvenience. Racing decided, at real legislative cost, that independence had to be structural, not aspirational. Show jumping and eventing are now being asked to trust that the same principle does not apply to a federation quietly buying into its own scorekeeper.
What a deal like this owes the sport, at minimum:
A published stake size, not just an announcement that a stake exists
A named, independent firewall between the Federation's competition department and EquiRatings' rating methodology
An outside audit of the risk index on a fixed schedule, with results made public
Written confirmation that the index's thresholds cannot be adjusted at the Federation's request
A clear channel for other federations relying on the same numbers to flag concerns without going through the new owner
The Trust the Numbers Were Supposed to Buy
None of this requires believing anyone at US Equestrian or EquiRatings has done anything wrong, or intends to. The entire value of a risk index is that it is trusted precisely because it does not need anyone's good intentions to hold up; it holds up because its incentives are aligned with accuracy rather than with anyone's comfort. That is what a hunter/jumper buyer is actually paying for when they check a horse's numbers before a purchase, or watch an elimination call get made at a championship: an assumption that the figures in front of them were produced by someone with nothing riding on the answer. The Federation may well be right that this deal changes nothing about how those numbers get made. The sport it governs should not have to take that on faith, and the burden of proving it falls, as it always does in questions of trust, on the party that just bought the microphone.
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