Dressage-News

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, July 28, 2016–The International Equestrian Federation working group set up to study judging in dressage and propose changes has held its first meeting after an Olympic qualifying period marked by some controversial results.

Led by FEI Dressage Committee chairman Frank Kemperman, the five-member panel may develop its first recommendations by next spring, an FEI spokesperson said.

The group’s first telephone conference was held Monday and stakeholder groups will be provided with a short ‎summary after each conference and, the FEI said, “will also be consulted for their input throughout the process.” Most of the meetings will be by teleconference with one in-person meeting planned.

The working group is tasked to:

–Evaluate whether measures introduced after the 2009 Dressage Task Force that revamped the sport and included a wider range of stakeholders in the FEI Dressage Committee had a “positive, neutral or negative effect on the quality of dressage judging;

–“Evaluating the current dressage judging system in general;

–“Creating a benchmark of various subjectively judged sports in order to define areas for improvement in the dressage system, and

–“Issuing recommendations to the FEI Dressage Committee on ways to improve the dressage judging system.”

Members of the task force are Frank Kemperman, chairman of the FEI Dressage Committee who led the 2009 task force that overhauled dressage after the 2008 Olympic Games, Maribel Alonso de Quinzaños, a 5* judge from Mexico and a member of the FEI Dressage Committee; Kyra Kyrklund, a five-time Olympian for Finland and president of the International Dressage Riders Club; Richard Davison, a four-time Olympian for Great Britain and David Stickland, a senior research physicist with Princeton University working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world who is a consultant to the FEI on dressage judging analysis.