FEI Warm Up Oversight: What Basel and the 2027 Rules Reveal

At the FEI World Cup Finals in Basel last April, horse welfare got its own viewing section. Three large screens went up at the entrance to the St. Jakobshalle, streaming live footage from the warm-up tents to anyone who wanted to watch. The tents themselves stayed closed to the public, but an independent panel was inside them anyway, taking notes nobody at the federation had actually asked for.

That panel belonged to R-Haltenswert, a German welfare initiative whose "Reflection Panel" draws roughly twenty judges, trainers, veterinarians, and ethicists to observe dressage, show jumping, eventing, and driving at major tournaments. For the 2025 World Cup Finals, the Basel organizing committee invited three of its observers to watch the warm-up areas for the full event and report their findings to FEI officials each day, under a pilot the two sides called Equine Quality Control. It was framed, carefully, as a supplement. The observers had no authority to disqualify a horse or stop a round. That power stayed where it has always stayed: with the FEI's own stewards and ground jury.

Even limited to watching, the panel found four cases it called urgent in a single event: abnormal movement and tongue behavior, restricted air supply, an overly tight noseband, and a curb chain buckled incorrectly. Its final report argued that existing rules were not being enforced closely enough to protect the horses competing under them, and warned that the greater risk to the sport was complacency, the assumption that stewarding as currently staffed had the warm-up adequately covered.

The FEI's answer, delivered to the British publication Horse and Hound at the time, was polite and unambiguous. Official decisions on welfare, field-of-play matters, and discipline remain under the "exclusive jurisdiction" of FEI officials, the federation said, adding that it would "respectfully disagree with any suggestion that questions the capability of the FEI stewards in Basel." It also said, in the same statement, that external expertise "can contribute to discussions on horse welfare" and that constructive feedback is essential to the sport's evolution. Both things were true at once: welcome the input, keep the authority. No second Basel pilot has since been reported, and neither the FEI nor R-Haltenswert has confirmed whether Equine Quality Control returns this year.

The same answer, a different discipline

About sixteen months later, almost the identical question came up again, this time inside the FEI's full rewrite of its dressage rulebook for 2027. The European Equestrian Federation proposed appointing "welfare supervisors" at championships and major events, with a specific brief: monitor the warm-up for excessive work, watch riders' hands, and flag spur and whip use in real time. It was, in substance, Basel's pilot formalized into a standing rule.

The FEI's Dressage Technical Committee said no. Its stated reasoning was that stewards and veterinary delegates already share responsibility for horse welfare in the warm-up, making a separate supervisory layer redundant. In its place, the committee is developing a new observation protocol for the officials already on the ground, and weighing compulsory video recording of warm-up sessions, cameras rather than a credentialed outsider with standing to raise a concern in the moment.

The rulebook rewrite is still moving through the FEI's own published process. A first draft went to national federations and stakeholders on July 20, 2026. A seven-week review window closed September 7. A final draft is due November 6. The rules themselves go to a vote at the General Assembly in Jiangyin, China, with the rules session on December 4 and the vote on December 5, the same meeting at which FEI delegates will also elect a new president. Nothing here is decided yet. What is already decided is that the version going to a vote will not include an independent warm-up supervisor, because the body responsible for that chapter has already turned the idea down once.

What the federation is actually protecting

The FEI's position deserves to be stated on its own terms before it gets argued with. Stewards are licensed, trained to a published standard, and accountable through the federation's own disciplinary process in a way a volunteer welfare panel is not. Handing sanctioning power to an outside group with no formal standing under FEI rules would create exactly the kind of parallel authority that makes a ground jury's decisions hard to defend in arbitration. "Exclusive jurisdiction" is a legal position as much as a defensive one, and it is not, by itself, evidence of an institution that does not care what happens in the warm-up tent.

But the Basel numbers undercut the part of that argument that matters most to a horse. Three extra sets of eyes, watching one event, found four problems serious enough to flag as urgent, on top of whatever the existing stewarding staff was already catching. That reflects coverage rather than any individual official's competence: a warm-up tent at a five-star final is large, continuous, and thin on staff relative to how much happens inside it, and more trained observers appear to find more problems. A camera can log that the same curb chain was buckled wrong. It cannot ask the groom standing next to the horse to fix it before the next round starts, which is the entire value an embedded human observer offers over a recording reviewed after the fact.

The dressage committee's proposed middle path, a protocol for existing officials plus video, treats the Basel findings as a data problem rather than a staffing problem. The findings suggest otherwise. R-Haltenswert did not uncover anything that required new technology to see. Its observers saw it because they were there, specifically to look, with nothing else competing for their attention.

Why the hunter/jumper buyer should care

None of this is a dressage story alone, and none of it is confined to Europe. The rules written into the FEI's book for CDI and CSI competition set the tone that national federations, USEF among them, eventually borrow from, adapt, or explicitly decline to follow. A hunter/jumper rider who never sets foot in a five-star warm-up tent still competes inside a sport whose governing body is actively deciding, this fall, how much independent scrutiny the warm-up ring is allowed to have. That decision will outlast this rules cycle.

The warm-up ring has always been the sport's least defensible space to a skeptical public: it is where tack gets tightened past comfort, where a horse's mouth and hindquarters absorb most of a rider's nerves, and where almost no spectator is ever standing close enough to see clearly. Basel proved, in one event, that a few more trained sets of eyes find real problems. The FEI's answer, in two separate disciplines and two separate years, has been to keep the authority in-house and improve the paperwork around it. That may well be the legally sound choice. It is a much harder case to make as the welfare choice, and the federation has not yet tried to make it.