May 14, 2025 
For most horseman, a small nick on your horse’s hind leg—one you might notice, say, while you’re grooming or bringing him in from the paddock—is par for the course.
Superficial injuries, as we know, are just as liable to occur while a horse is rolling outside or getting up in her stall as they are jumping or performing elite training maneuvers. But it hardly mattered for the U.S. Dressage Team last year in Paris.
A small cut on Jane’s hind fetlock during Marcus Orlob’s FEI Grand Prix test (likely self-inflicted by the 10-year-old KWPN mare when she spooked coming into the arena) was enough to disqualify not only Orlob but the entire American team from Olympic competition.
It’s serious stuff, but hardly unheard of. Violations of the FEI’s blood rule do happen in all three Olympic disciplines, and even at the same Games: Italian eventer Emiliano Portale was also disqualified in Paris after blood was discovered in his horse’s mouth following dressage.
In Rio in 2016, four show jumpers were ultimately eliminated by the the ground jury for what was determined to be an overuse of their spurs or whip. At Tokyo in 2021, a German pentathlon coach was thrown out of the Games for punching a horse in the head.
And last summer in Paris, the sport of dressage found itself under the microscope following the withdrawal of British Champion Charlotte Dujardin just days before the Opening Ceremony after an old video surfaced of her whipping a horse in training.
But even when these incidents aren’t related to a rider’s bit, spur, or whip-use, they can have serious repercussions that go beyond where an athlete or nation ends up in the medal count. The world is watching at the Olympics, and not only is the lens on sport magnified, but the potential consequences are too.
The Summer Olympic Games, after all, is one of the few occasions that equestrian has to bring new members into the fold. For a few days every four years, all eyes—both educated and untrained—are on show jumping, dressage, and eventing, giving us the chance to display the best aspects of our sport, and in some of these cases, the worst.
And, whichever way it goes, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which oversees the more than 30 sports that currently comprise the Summer Olympic Games, is watching. The committee tracks each sport’s social media traction, airplay generated, and popularity vs. cost “in minute detail,” according to The New York Times.
In other words, one badly timed, misrepresentative, or even deceptively taken clip or photo—maybe an image of a horse’s leg at a questionable angle (poll your non-horse friends, they’ll tell you!)—can have serious ramifications.
Thankfully, a new study conducted by Hartpury University, EQuerry / Co, and Via Nova Training is working to understand how equestrians react to visual representations of horses in sport.
Their goal is to learn what we know and what we don’t know about the world’s perceptions of equestrian at the Olympic Games, and how these perceptions can impact show jumping, dressage, and eventing’s Social License to Operate (SLO).
It works like this. Using a photo-elicitation approach, the study presents participants with randomly selected equestrian images from the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, from training and veterinary inspections to competition and post-event interactions.
Survey participants are invited to anonymously respond to the images with their thoughts and feelings, enabling researchers to analyze which images evoke positive, neutral, or negative perceptions—and what beliefs are driving those reactions.
The hope? That the survey will help to guide researchers’ understanding for how visual cues contribute to positive perceptions of horse sport. What’s more, they want to discover how different groups of equestrians interpret the same image, and what role the media and social platforms play in shaping these opinions.
Perception is reality, as they say. If we want equestrian sports to continue to be successful on the international stage for generations to come, we all must all do our part to understand the perceptions that we as equestrians, both consciously and unconsciously, are putting out into the world.
The ‘Understanding Perception Through Imagery Survery’ takes just a few minutes to complete and you can take it here.
