Horse welfare and Los Angeles 2028 qualifications take centre stage on opening day of FEI Sport Forum 2025

Sport Forum

The FEI Sports Forum 2025, held at the IMD Business School in Lausanne (SUI), opened today with a warm welcome from FEI President Ingmar De Vos to both the large audience present and those following the event online. In his opening remarks, Mr De Vos introduced the key topics of the day and highlighted two essential aspects of the Olympic Games, the focus of the first session.

Session 1:
Qualification Systems for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.


FEI Deputy Legal Director Áine Power clarified that the Olympic Regulations which deals with topics such as competition formats, horse ownership, substitutions will be discussed next year as part of the 2026 rule revision process.

Roadmap Roadmap

Qualification Systems vs. FEI Olympic Regulations Qualification Systems vs. FEI Olympic Regulations

She then took participants through:

  • qualification timelines (will start at next year’s FEI World Championships in Aachen and will run through to 31 December 2027. The period to earn MERs runs from 1 January 2026 to 11 July 2028)

 

LA2028 Qualification Timeline LA2028 Qualification timeline

  • covering quotas, allocation of quotas and reallocation of quotas
  • qualification events
  • Minimum Eligibility Requirements (MERs) FEI Olympic Groups (period for achieving it will be between 1 January 2026 to 11 July 2028)
  • the proposed qualification framework for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympics Games
TEAM QUALIFICATION
A noteworthy new proposal concerns team qualification across the three disciplines in the event the National Olympic Committee (NOC) Certificate of Capability is not submitted or the Team Quota Allocation is withdrawn or not confirmed. The proposal is to no longer automatically allocate that NOC an Individual Quota Place, and the NOC must earn an Individual Quota Place via the Olympic Rankings/Qualification Event (if applicable) instead. This proposal was welcomed by the participants.
 
Sessions summaries

Summaries from each of the day’s four sessions are available at the links below:

Presentations:

The PowerPoint presentations made at each Session are available in pdf format in the FEI Sports Forum 2025 online hub (Session Documents section).

Image at the top: 
 
Session 4 FEI Jumping Rules full revision ©FEI/Germain Arias-Schreiber-7
Source: FEI website