A Birthday at Fox Lea Farm
On February 19, 2025, Ryan Haselden turned fourteen years old partway through a jumper class at Fox Lea Farm in Venice, Florida. Her horse drifted off its track toward the standards between two fences, and she did not correct it. Within seconds she had lost consciousness. By the time a doctor watching from the gazebo reached her side, she had no pulse.
That doctor, Karley Koch, and the show's certified emergency medical technician began two-person CPR while someone ran for the automated external defibrillator kept near the in-gate. The shock restored Haselden's heartbeat. She was taken to a hospital, where her family learned she carried a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Fewer than ten percent of people who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital survive it, according to American Heart Association data. Haselden did, and by the following spring she was competing again.
Her survival is also, increasingly, the reason a rule exists.
The Rule USEF Has Not Passed Yet
The U.S. Hunter Jumper Association's board approved a proposal at its December 2025 annual meeting and forwarded it to US Equestrian for final approval: General Rule 845.1, Tracking #001-25, which would require an automated external defibrillator on-site at every USEF-licensed competition, in every discipline the federation governs, not only hunters and jumpers. If the USEF board adopts it, the rule takes effect June 1, 2027.
The word "every" is doing real work in that sentence. USEF's rulebook already requires an AED at hunter, jumper, and hunter/jumper competitions -- with an exception carved out for Level 1 jumper shows, the entry tier where a young rider on a green horse over small verticals is exactly as capable of needing one as a rider two divisions up. Disciplines outside the hunter/jumper world are not required to have a device on the grounds at all. Closing that gap is what Haselden's family has spent the past year and a half asking the federation to do, through the nonprofit they founded after her collapse -- the Impulsion Foundation, which funds and teaches CPR and AED training at shows that do not yet have either.
What GR845.1 Would Change
Requires an AED on-site at every USEF-licensed competition, across all disciplines
Closes the current exception for Level 1 jumper competitions
Targets a June 1, 2027 effective date, pending a final USEF board vote
Follows sustained advocacy from the Haselden family and the Impulsion Foundation
Some USHJA affiliates have raised cost and liability concerns during the discussion, along with a practical objection from disciplines like eventing, where a course spreads riders across open ground rather than a single ring, making a single fixed device harder to reach in time. Those are legitimate logistical questions. They are not, on their own, a reason to leave the current rule as written for two more competition years while the industry works them out.
What Three Minutes Actually Buys
The clinical case here is not new, and it is not close. The American Heart Association's resuscitation guidelines, published in Circulation, put a number on the ordinary passage of time: survival from ventricular fibrillation, the rhythm behind most sudden cardiac arrests in young, apparently healthy athletes, falls seven to ten percent for every minute that passes without a shock.
An eighteen-year study of amateur sports centers in the Piacenza region of Italy, part of the public-access defibrillation program known as Progetto Vita and presented by cardiologist Diego Penela, measured what that decline looks like in practice. Over the study period, twenty-six people suffered cardiac arrest at a monitored sports facility. Fifteen of those arrests happened at a center equipped with an AED; fourteen of those fifteen people survived with no neurological damage, a rate of ninety-three percent. Eleven arrests happened at centers with no device on-site; one person survived, a rate of nine percent. Every case in both groups received CPR. The only variable was how many minutes passed before someone could deliver a shock.
A horse show, in exactly the relevant sense, is a sports center with an ambulance that has not arrived yet. Rural showgrounds routinely sit well outside the three-to-five-minute window sports medicine research treats as the outer edge of a survivable delay. The AED does not replace an ambulance. It is what a rider has instead of one, for however many minutes the drive actually takes.
The Sport Already Wrote the Other Rule
USEF's board met for its mid-year session in June 2026 and passed a general rule requiring that any horse or pony that collapses during a hunter, jumper, or hunter/jumper competition be withdrawn from the grounds for a minimum of seven days, pending a licensed veterinarian's written clearance to return. It is a sound rule, and it closed a real gap in how the sport responds when a horse goes down in the ring.
It is also proof that USEF can move fast when it decides collapse in the ring warrants a mandatory federal response. That rule went from proposal to enforcement within a single competition year. The rule addressing what happens when the rider collapses instead has been moving through committee since Haselden's cardiac arrest in February 2025, and on the current timeline will not take effect until June 2027 -- more than two years after the incident that made it necessary. Both risks are real. For now, only one of them has a deadline.
Before June 2027
Nothing in USEF's current rulebook stops a competition manager from putting an AED at the in-gate today, at every level and in every discipline, regardless of what the federation eventually decides. The device costs a fraction of what one horse's entry fees run for a single circuit. The training to use it correctly takes an afternoon, and organizations including the Impulsion Foundation are already offering it free of charge in some regions. Whether a show ground has a defibrillator and a staff member trained to use it is a reasonable question to put to a manager before entries close this winter. It has been a reasonable question since February 2025.
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