Nine a Week: The FEI's New Blood Rule, Six Months In

On the first of August, 2024, Pedro Veniss rode into the team jumping qualifier at the Paris Olympics and did the hardest thing in the sport: he jumped a clear round when his country needed one. Then a steward's white glove came away from Nimrod de Muze's flank with a faint smear of blood, and Brazil's day ended anyway. No fault was assigned. The rule did not require any. It required only blood, and blood there was — a mark so small the FEI's own statement called it, without irony, "no intention to hurt or harm."

Fourteen months later, at the FEI General Assembly in Hong Kong, the federation's member nations voted 56 to 20, with two abstentions, to make sure that never happens quite that way again. Beginning January 1, 2026, a horse presenting blood caused by the rider, the handler, or the equipment in show jumping no longer means automatic elimination. It means a Jumping Recorded Warning — the first two, at least. A second warning within a rolling twelve months brings a fine of CHF 1,000 and a one-month suspension. Blood judged incidental — a bitten tongue, a nosebleed — can be wiped by an official and the round continues, provided a veterinarian confirms the horse fit to carry on.

The Case for the Change

It is worth taking the FEI's side for a moment, because it has one. The old rule made no distinction between abuse and accident, and Rodrigo Pessoa — Olympic individual gold medalist and a member of the FEI's jumping and athletes committees — said so publicly after Veniss's elimination, calling for proportionality when the injury is a "micro lesion" rather than a mark of cruelty. A discipline that eliminates identically for a spur mark and a horse biting its own tongue is not being precise. It is being lazy, and calling the laziness a principle.

But precision was not what the FEI built. It built discretion, and discretion is not self-enforcing — six months of the federation's own numbers say so. By February 12, 2026, forty-seven Jumping Recorded Warnings for blood had already been logged. By roughly the twentieth week of the year, that figure had reached 186 warnings at CSIs worldwide — nine a week. Under the old rule, jumping riders were eliminated for blood on the flank 116 times in all of 2025, and 83 times in 2024: a rate of roughly two a week, and 1.6 a week the year before. The mechanism built to be more forgiving is registering blood on horses four to five times more often than the mechanism it replaced ever recorded elimination.

Two readings are possible, and the FEI has picked the flattering one. Either warnings are simply easier to hand out than eliminations ever were — officials now logging what they once had to either ignore or end a competitor's day over — and the sport is watching, in real time, how much its old numbers understated the problem. Or riders, freed from the threat of instant elimination, are taking marginally more risk with the whip, the spur, and the bit than they did a year ago. Neither version supports what Áine Power, the FEI's executive director of sport and games, told reporters when the backlash began: that federation data showed blood incidents were "rare" and the new rule was "better for the horse and better for the sport." Six months in, blood incidents are not rare. They are simply no longer disqualifying.

A Backlash the FEI Says It Didn't See Coming

The reaction Power says caught the FEI by surprise was not subtle. A Change.org petition to reverse the rule passed 65,000 signatures within weeks, drawing signers from Brazil to Canada to Italy. British Equestrian and British Showjumping announced they would not adopt the change domestically, arguing that whatever the rule's genuine improvements — and enhanced veterinary checks are a real one — blood during or after a round should still end the round. The International Society for Equitation Science went further, calling the change incompatible with the precautionary principle recommended by the FEI's own Equine Ethics and Wellbeing Commission, and with the society's first training principle: avoid methods or equipment that cause the horse pain, distress, or injury. Power later allowed that "there are learnings to take forward" — an admission, in federation language, that the sport misjudged how this would read to the people who fund it by buying tickets, sponsorships, and horses.

What USEF Did Instead

None of this is abstract for a rider showing under USEF rules at home, because the federation that actually governs most of this readership's competition life went the other direction. At its mid-year board meeting on August 26, 2025, the USEF board approved an amendment to General Rule 843 that keeps automatic elimination for blood caused by the rider, the handler, or equipment — no warning system — while carving out a narrow, specific exception: a horse with a bitten lip or tongue can be wiped clean by the judge or ground jury and continue, provided no further blood appears. It is the same problem Pedro Veniss's elimination exposed, solved with a scalpel instead of a warning system. USEF did not need to invent discretion. It needed to define the exception precisely enough that officials could apply it without inventing their own thresholds in the moment — which is exactly what a warning system asks hundreds of different judges, at hundreds of different shows, to do on their own.

The science argues for holding the line, not loosening it. A study published in May 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Animals, conducted through Fluminense Federal University in Brazil, filmed 120 horse-rider pairs at elite Brazilian show jumping competitions and coded every recognized conflict behavior — head shaking, tail swishing, neck hyperflexion, excessive rein pulling, kicking, bucking, rearing, refusal. Every horse in the study, 120 out of 120, showed at least one of them, most commonly head shaking. Roughly forty-two percent showed just one type of behavior and another forty-three percent showed two — meaning the overwhelming majority of horses in the ring were signaling some form of conflict, mild as it may have looked from the rail, and almost none of it carries any consequence under any federation's rules. Blood was never a good proxy for a horse's welfare in the round. It was simply the one signal no judge could argue with. The FEI just made that signal argue back.

Quiet luxury has never meant looking away from what is uncomfortable to say plainly. NHE covers this beat because the horse cannot vote at the General Assembly, cannot sign the petition, and cannot explain to a steward that a nosebleed and a spur mark are not the same thing. Someone has to hold that distinction for him — precisely, not permissively. USEF just showed the FEI how.