Starting this year, the FEI assumed all financial responsibility for testing at competitions. They send out a Vet and technicians to the venue to do the testing.
You can read more about this here.
This is interesting:
A change has been made to the Veterinary Regulations where testing at 3* level events and above is no longer mandatory, and there is no longer a minimum number or percentage of horses that must be sampled at each FEI event. This will allow the FEI Veterinary Department to carry out testing evenly across the disciplines and across the different levels of FEI events.
IMO, testing should be mandatory for the top four spots in both team and individual competitions in which there is either a championship or a qualification for a championship. I say four because if someone loses a podium spot to a positive drugs finding, you also want to know that your newly-promoted medalist is playing by the rules.
One potential issue here is that it looks bad to the IOC to have doping positives in your sport, especially if the ISF feels the threat of Olympic expulsion. ISFs will do just about anything to keep their sport in the Olympics. Sadly for those who want an equal playing field, the ISFs have realized that itâs easier to sweep doping under the rug (hello IAAF) and just claim itâs not happening. One way to do that is to conduct fewer tests.
In equestrian sports, the need to pretend all is swell cuts against the FEIâs mission statement on horse welfare. I hope these new policies arenât the FEIâs way of weaseling out of a serious anti-doping protocol.
