FEI's 2026 Presidential Election: The Closed Field Explained

A Vote With No Debate Stage

On December 5, at the FEI General Assembly in Jiangyin, China, the Fédération Equestre Internationale's roster of 136 member national federations will elect a new president to lead the global body that governs show jumping, dressage, eventing, and five other disciplines. Three people are on the ballot. All three already hold senior positions inside the organization they are campaigning to lead.

Mark Samuel is a former FEI Vice President who now carries Honorary Vice President status. Sabrina Ibáñez has run FEI's day-to-day operations as Secretary General since December 2014. Jack Huang has served as an FEI Vice President since 2019. Between them, the three candidates account for decades inside the same Lausanne-based bureaucracy, and not one of them is arriving from outside it.

Who Is Actually Running

Samuel, a Canadian businessman and former international show jumper who competed for Canada between 1999 and 2003, built his FEI career on the administrative side of a sport he once rode in. He chaired FEI Regional Group IV, covering North America and parts of the Caribbean, starting in 2012, then served as an FEI Vice President from 2017 to 2024, earning Equestrian Canada's Gold Medal for service along the way. In a campaign interview with Horse Sport, he framed his candidacy around financial discipline and commercial growth, saying his first 100 days would involve a close review of FEI's finance and commercial departments alongside the federation's existing leadership in Lausanne.

Ibáñez has arguably the deepest institutional knowledge of the three. She joined the FEI in 1991, moved into the role of Director of Governance and Executive Affairs in 2011, and was appointed Secretary General, the organization's top staff position, in December 2014. She is standing under the nomination of El Salvador's federation. No candidate has spent more years inside FEI headquarters, and none has a more direct hand in how the current rulebook, budget, and staff structure actually function day to day.

Huang, representing Chinese Taipei, has chaired FEI Regional Group VIII, covering Asia and Oceania, since 2016, and has sat as an FEI Vice President since 2019. His candidacy lands at a moment when the federation's own calendar has leaned east: this will be the second consecutive year the General Assembly meets in Greater China, following 2025's gathering in Hong Kong.

All three candidates filed manifestos with FEI in July, each required to align with the federation's existing Strategy 2025 to 2029. FEI held an online session for member federations to question the candidates on September 15. Beyond Samuel's finance and commerce framing, specifics have stayed thin in public reporting. The manifestos themselves sit behind FEI's members-only election hub, not in front of the riders, grooms, and owners whose sport the next president will run.

What the Winner Inherits

Whoever wins arrives at a federation managing more live fires than most incoming presidents face on day one. The blood rule divide between show jumping, which loosened its automatic elimination standard at last year's Assembly, and dressage, which tightened its own that same week, remains unresolved by the task force FEI convened to reconcile them. The Longines League of Nations jumping final lost its Olympic qualification role for Los Angeles 2028 in that same vote, with the vacated team slots moving to the World Championships instead, and the series still needs a format that justifies the investment member federations keep putting into it. The federation's own doping-testing numbers remain unpublished in a form outside auditors can use. And in September, FEI's Council restored Russia's flag, anthem, and hosting rights, effective October 5, according to the Russian federation's own announcement of the decision.

None of that is new territory for a federation president. What is new is doing it under a social license problem NHE has covered repeatedly this year: a British public that has told researchers for three straight years that its trust in horse sport is not improving, a hunter/jumper membership absorbing its own steep fee increases at the national level, and a welfare conversation that has moved well past the show ring and into the boardroom.

The Case for Continuity, and Why It Is Not Enough

There is a real argument for an insider succession. FEI's current workload, the blood rule reconciliation, the welfare rule questions still moving through committee, the financial pressure on smaller member federations, rewards someone who already knows where the levers are. Dropping an outsider into Lausanne mid-crisis carries its own risk, and a sitting Secretary General or Vice President arrives already fluent in the federation's budget, its staff, and its unfinished business. That advantage is not small, and NHE is not pretending otherwise.

But a federation fighting to keep the public's permission to continue should want its own leadership change to look like scrutiny, not succession planning. Three candidates, each already on the federation's payroll or Bureau, choosing among themselves which one of them becomes president, is not the kind of accountability moment a sport under this much outside pressure can afford to treat as routine business. Hunter and jumper riders who watched USEF hand its own chief executive role from one twenty-year insider to another this fall should recognize the shape of it. The question worth asking before December 5 is not only which of the three should win. It is why the field looked like this in the first place, and whether a federation this large can keep answering its own legitimacy problem with the people already inside the building.