The rule definitely does not preclude the groom or assistant from competing their own horse or a horse owned by someone else! The rule is that at a competition, only the rider competing the horse in the competition may ride the horse. No one else can school, warm up, or otherwise ride the horse, except that a groom may walk or trot the horse from place to place (to or from the warm up area, for example, but not around the warm up area).
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Yes I’m currently playing in Hunter Jumper land where that’s much more prevalent, but I believe it’s more clear here and I guess my point was if she did truly have somebody else warming up her horses past what the rule says is acceptable are they hoping people just don’t say anything? Who knows
Say you have a rider with several solid bay horses competing and an assistant competing their horse on a solid bay - it’s easy for someone make an assumption/accusation. A trainer friend was bashed for entering her horse in too many divisions at a hunter show. As show manager that day I had to inform the basher that the trainer happened to be showing 4 chestnuts all w/ blazes and white socks. I once shut out a trainer from a class - she was showing this big chestnut I had no idea she had 2 nearly identical horses - owned by the same guy who at that time happened to be the president of the Washington International Horse Show. Whoopsie.
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That’s good to know. I’ve never competed in recognized dressage, so I’m not familiar with the rules there.
Total-Pie-In-The-Sky-Idea: riders have microchip bracelets that they have to wear while riding. Both the bracelet and the horses microchip are scanned when the rider enters the warm up arena and the scanner person has a list of the microchip numbers of each combination.
No idea how feasible that would be, but could be a solution to the “lookalike horses” issue.
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Don’t the horses already have to have chips?
And as far who rides the horses at/during the competition Ive never evented I my life and even I knew that rule
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Denis has always been [edit], he just hid it really well. It’s now the [edit] climate that we live in makes him think it’s okay to say the quiet parts out loud. 
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Yes, and it will need to be on their USEF record starting in December. So in my example, USEF would issue a microchip bracelet to each rider and the warm up stewards would have a list of the microchip numbers of each pair and would scan them as they enter the warm up arena. And they would verify that rider 12345 is riding horse 67890. No worries about doppelgänger horses ridden by identical twins, the chips don’t lie.
Like I said above, I have absolutely no idea how viable this idea really is. But it seems simple enough to implement.
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It actually does. Of course, getting the riders to keep track of their bracelets would probably be a cute trick. I wonder how much it would cost to keep replacing them when they get lost. But I bet it could be done. Especially if people are using things like road ID or whatever they could even integrate it somehow into that or into their medical armband
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Who is to say riders and grooms won’t just trade bracelets?
Is the grooms riding horses in the warmup a significant problem happening everywhere or did happen in this case and therefore people are extrapolating it happened elsewhere, too?
I don’t think the grooms/trainers riding multiple horses thing is that likely to happen in eventing because each horse can only go once, unless I’m misreading people’s concerns on this thread. Much more likely to happen in dressage or hunter/jumper land where horses can be entered in multiple classes per day.
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In H/j land nobody cares who rides what when
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No one is trying to compete the same horse twice at the same competition. The concern is that someone else is warming up or schooling the horse at a show, which is not allowed. In this particular case, the accusation seems to be that a rider who was busy with (too) many horses at a show had her groom warm one of them up.
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There was a story I heard many years ago about a pair of identical twins who both showed in the equitation. But one of them rode quite a bit better than the other.
So when push came to shove when they got close to the deadline to qualify for the finals at the end of the year… 
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That’s what I said. It seems that in hunters and jumpers, there is some concern of different people showing the same horse twice or one person entering too many classes in one day on the same horse. Three entirely different issues are being discussed.
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I’m also not a fan of a rider who has family money to fund her “profession” yet somehow manages to get multiple grants to ride overseas. JMHO though.
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DoNt YoU ReMeMbEr HoW hEr PaReNts South American bUsiNeSs sUfFeREd? Queue the tiny orchestra
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I presumed the multiple horses being warmed up by grooms issue was more about crowding the warm up and “owning” jumps, than about schooling on the day.
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As someone who frequently does a warm-up ring at not FEI level, but rated level, I gasped at this idea.
It sounds good in theory but I can not imagine me trying to do all these things, let alone the fun of getting those lists, keeping track of those lists, etc.
I have a hard enough time just getting people to check in with me that they are there.
Add, how many chip readers would they need to buy to do this?
A bracelet can easily be handed off to another person after you have checked in.
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It’s not actually hard.
This is how packages are moved and tracked. RFID chips. It doesn’t actually require you to keep the list … the list is kept electronically for you as people come within range of scanners and devices. Easier, faster and more accurate.
This is the basic technology used to track inventory in stores, move packages globally and track marathon run times (and monitor access and attendance at work).
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I guess I must be a bit crabby. While the microchip idea is clever, it makes me mad to think we small time competitors might have to add one more expense on our list and add one more headache onto volunteers and organizers just to prevent a very small number of top level bad actors from cheating. IMHO the cost of adding more hoops to stop a rare instance is not worth it. I’d rather focus on how to make things safer and supporting officials and other riders when they see and say something that others may perceive as MYOB or unwarranted concern.
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