The history of eventing safety.

The deaths and injuries on this page are recorded as published history, with the source that reported each one. They are not lessons and nothing here describes how to ride. The FEI's current rules and statistics are on eventing safety and frangible devices.

Heat and the long format, 1992 to 1996

An FEI guidance document on competing in hot conditions, written in March 2018 by Dr David Marlin, Dr Martha Misheff and Dr Peter Whitehead and hosted by British Equestrian, records that the heat at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, especially in long-format eventing, led the FEI to launch an international scientific and veterinary welfare project in 1993 ahead of Atlanta 1996. More than 50 scientific papers were published between 1992 and 1996, and the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature index the FEI now uses to measure heat stress was developed for Atlanta. More on heat is on heat and competition.

1999 and the Hartington Report

Practical Horseman (Jenni Autry, 31 July 2018) says five event riders died in Great Britain in the 1999 season. Carol Hall of Nottingham Trent University, writing in The Conversation on 8 August 2016, gives five deaths in Britain and one in the United States that year, and says five of the six followed rotational falls. The two counts fit if Practical Horseman is counting Britain only.

According to Practical Horseman, the deaths led the FEI to form an International Eventing Safety Committee in 2000, chaired by the Marquess of Hartington, with the 2000 Olympic individual champion David O'Connor among its members. Its report of April 2000, the Hartington Report, named two areas as the most critical: frangible (collapsible) fence technology, and the collection of fall data worldwide.

Frangible pins and the falls database

Practical Horseman says frangible pins developed by the Transport Research Laboratory were trialled at nine British Eventing events, including Badminton, in 2002, and that before the 2006 season British Eventing fitted them to all new fences at every level. Hall puts it slightly differently: from 2006 British Eventing required pins on as many fences as possible, while at FEI level their use was left to the course designer.

Practical Horseman gives two start dates for the FEI's worldwide record of falls and injuries in the same article: 2002 in one place and 2006 in another. It dates the first FEI annual eventing statistics report to 2007.

The end of the long format, 2004 to 2009

Eventing's endurance day used to include roads and tracks and a steeplechase before the cross-country. Olympedia says Sydney 2000 was the last Olympics with this long, or "classic", format, and that the FEI created the short format without those phases partly because the IOC was considering dropping eventing over the cost and land the endurance phase needed. Badminton and Burghley ran their last long-format events in 2005. The Chronicle of the Horse (Sara Lieser, 6 August 2009) dates the FEI's decision to 2004, the year Athens used the new format, and says the FEI removed roads and tracks and steeplechase from its rules in 2009, so that from 2010 a three-day event with a steeplechase could no longer be an FEI event.

The reasons are put differently:

• Olympedia: the IOC's concerns about cost and land.
• US Eventing (search summary only): cost, and the availability of land and volunteers.
• The Chronicle of the Horse (search summary only): FEI officers' wish to cut costs and reduce risk, with supporters arguing that fewer phases meant fewer injuries.

Not everyone agreed it should go. The Chronicle's 2009 article reports that Penny Ross of the Virginia Three-Day and the Olympian Jim Wofford argued the classic format taught horsemanship and suited amateurs, and that Wofford had backed a two-track system since 1999. A small number of US organisers kept running long-format events, which the FEI no longer recognised.

2007 and 2008

A second cluster of deaths followed. Animal People reported in June 2008, citing the Lexington Herald-Leader, that at least 12 riders had died worldwide in about 18 months, all on cross-country. A Horse and Hound report from 2008, seen only as a search summary, gave seven deaths in the previous ten months and said the FEI had set up a safety sub-committee chaired by David O'Connor.

Practical Horseman records that at the Red Hills Horse Trials in Florida in 2008, two horses, Jonathan Holling's Direct Merger and Missy Miller's Leprechaun's Rowdy Boy, died of pulmonary haemorrhage, and the rider Darren Chiacchia was seriously injured in a rotational fall. The US Eventing Association then formed a Cardiopulmonary Research Group led by Dr Catherine Kohn.

In June 2008 US Equestrian and the US Eventing Association met in Lexington to discuss the toll, Animal People reported, and USEF president David O'Connor said safety could be improved by reducing horse falls. Search summaries of Horse and Hound coverage add that the FEI brought in a rule for the 2008 Olympics requiring a rider who fell on cross-country to retire rather than remount; we could not confirm it.

Research published that year looked back further. Equine Ink reported on 21 July 2008 on a study by Denzil O'Brien and Raymond Cripps of Flinders University, written for an Australian rural research body, which counted 25 rider deaths worldwide between May 1997 and September 2007. In 18 of them the horse had made a rotational fall, and 17 of those riders were crushed by the horse. The authors named reducing horse falls as the most effective way to reduce injuries.

Frangible devices become the rule

2013

The FEI approved the MIM Safe New Era Clip, which releases under both vertical and horizontal force (Practical Horseman). US Eventing says MIM clips were developed by the Swedish inventor Mats Bjornetun, whose company also tests car safety devices.

2015 to 2018

EquiRatings launched in 2015. Practical Horseman says Ireland became the first national federation to use its quality index nationally in 2016 and reported upper-level falls more than halving that year; in 2017 the FEI signed a four-year deal with EquiRatings and O'Connor was elected chair of the FEI Eventing Committee; the US Eventing Association followed nationally in 2018.

2018

Practical Horseman reported rotational falls dropping from about one in 268 starters to about one in 572 since FEI data recording began, and an FEI estimate that about 3,500 international cross-country fences carried frangible technology. It also reported that activating a device carried 11 penalties, which the ground jury could waive in defined cases.

1 January 2021

The 2021 FEI Eventing Rules, approved by the General Assembly in November 2020, made FEI-approved frangible devices compulsory on open oxers, open corners, verticals with open rails, triple-bar top rails and gates at CCI1* to CCI5*, where the rails fit the device limits (US Eventing). US Eventing gives the updated device standard as version 2.5 of 6 April 2020.

2025

The FEI's statistics deck, presented on 31 January 2026, shows rotational falls falling from 30 in 2016 to 15 in 2025 and 22 serious or fatal injuries in 2025. The deck groups serious and fatal injuries together, so it gives no separate count of deaths.

How many have died

Different bodies have counted deaths on different bases, so the figures cannot be added together or compared directly. Practical Horseman (2018) cited FEI figures of 14 rider deaths on cross-country at international competitions since 2004, and tallies by Horsetalk.co.nz of 38 rider deaths at all levels since 2004, with 17 more from 1997, and 91 horse deaths on cross-country since 2005. Our research could not confirm those tallies beyond Practical Horseman's report of them.

Do frangible fences reduce falls?

• Carol Hall (The Conversation, 2016) cited an FEI audit that found fences with frangible pins were linked to a higher risk of falls, and noted that advocates describe the devices as reducing how bad a fall is, not preventing falls.
• The Chronicle of the Horse (March 2026) reported that frangible devices are linked to a statistically significant drop in rotational falls, and that a faster route for approving national-level frangible designs was announced in 2025.

Injury data across the sport are on what the injury data shows, and a 2021 study of every FEI eventing start from 2008 to 2018 is on eventing safety and frangible devices; any suspected injury needs medical care.