After the Last Fence, a Different Kind of Pressure: Why the Podium is Harder on the Horse than the Course

Equestrian sport treats the award ceremony as the safe, celebratory close to a competition day. Survey and physiological data say otherwise. Riders rate themselves as most nervous during the test and warm-up, but their horses are reported as most tense during the lap of honour. Kicks were named as the leading cause of ceremony injuries to both riders and horses, though at different rates: 36.5% of rider injury cases versus 58.5% of horse injury cases. This piece draws on a 2022 German survey of 700 riders, supporting physiological work on cortisol and heart rate variability in competition horses, and the unsettled literature on emotional transfer between horse and rider, to ask why the ceremony itself functions as a distinct welfare event rather than a footnote to competition, and what changes might reduce the risk without removing horses from the podium.

By Debora Cinganelli, Equine Neuroethologist & Welfare Consultant

Published July 3, 2026

In November 2019, a young rider died after a fall during the award ceremony of a tournament in Neuenkirchen, Germany. Three years earlier, at the Rio Olympics, a groom was kicked in the head during the medal ceremony for the dressage team. Neither incident happened during a round, a test, or a warm-up: both happened in the few minutes set aside to celebrate.

These cases pushed German researchers to ask a question that had never been studied directly: is the award ceremony itself a welfare and safety problem in equestrian sport, separate from the risks of competing? A 2022 survey of 700 dressage and showjumping riders, published in the journal Animal Welfare, suggests the answer is yes, and that the most demanding moment for the horse is not the one most people would expect (Gehlen et al., 2022).

The Pattern the Data Shows

The riders surveyed by Gehlen and colleagues described their own nerves as highest during the test itself (55.3%) and in the warm-up arena (49.1%), with the award ceremony coming last (31.3%).

But their horses told a different story: 48% of riders said their horse was most tense at the award ceremony, and 71.7% reported visible stress specifically during the lap of honour, more than during applause (65.7%) or while standing still waiting (64%).

60% of respondents felt the ceremony carried an increased risk of injury, second only to the warm-up arena (66.6%). Kicks were named as the leading cause of ceremony injuries to both riders and horses, though at different rates: 36.5% of rider injury cases against 58.5% of horse injury cases. Over 40% of participants had at some point asked for special dispensation to skip the ceremony with their horse, and in more than half of those cases the reason given was a nervous or unmanageable animal.

In other words: riders feel the pressure during the test, but horses carry the tension into the moment that is supposed to be the easy part.

Why a Victory Lap Doesn't Feel Like a Reward to a Horse

The horse remains, behaviourally, a flight animal: sudden noise and fast movement near its flanks are exactly the combination its nervous system is built to escape from. Experimental work on equine responses to novel stimuli found that horses react with a startle or flight response to acoustic and visual triggers far milder than a crowd (Christensen et al., 2005). Within the German survey itself, a separate test found that recorded applause triggered an escape reaction in 95.7% of horses tested under controlled conditions (Goslar, 2011, cited in Gehlen et al., 2022).

The lap of honour layers several of these triggers at once: other horses moving close together, often at a faster pace than usual; applause and amplified voices from loudspeakers; music; and the physical act of someone reaching up to clip a ribbon onto the bridle, right next to the horse's head. None of this is present, in the same combination, anywhere else in a competition day.

The rulebook itself treats the ceremony as a different risk category. Running reins (draw reins) are banned throughout the competition arena under FEI rules, with one stated exception: prize-giving ceremonies and march-past parades (FEI Jumping Rules, Annex, Art. 21.2.3). A piece of equipment considered unsafe or unfair to use while jumping a course is, in other words, explicitly permitted for the one part of the day when riders are managing a horse with no fences, no pace, and no plan to follow, just noise, crowding, and an animal that may already be over threshold.

What the physiology says

Surveys rely on what riders noticed and chose to report, which is useful but subjective. A separate line of research has measured the same question through cortisol and heart rate, and it points the same way. Salivary cortisol and heart rate rise measurably around competition, and heart rate variability, a marker of how well the autonomic nervous system is coping, drops (von Lewinski et al., 2013; Munk et al., 2017). One of the earliest studies in this area found that horses on their first show outings carried higher baseline cortisol than experienced campaigners, even before the round began (Covalesky et al., 1992). None of this is specific to the ceremony, as these studies measured competition broadly, but they confirm that the stress responses riders describe subjectively have a measurable physiological counterpart.

Does a tense rider make for a tense horse?

The German survey found a significant statistical link between how tense the rider reported feeling and how tense their horse appeared at the ceremony (P < 0.001), though this kind of association can't tell us which way the influence runs, or whether both are simply reacting to the same noise and crowd.

The broader literature on emotional transfer between horses and riders is genuinely mixed: some studies describe horses picking up on human body language and heart rate (Scopa et al., 2019); a recent pilot study found that horses responded more to a handler's posture and movement than to their anxiety level as such, suggesting body language, not stress itself, is the channel that matters (Manolăchescu et al., 2025).

A 2025 scoping review of the whole field concluded that methods and findings are still too inconsistent across studies to settle the question either way (Tripon et al., 2025). For now, this is a plausible contributing factor in ceremony stress, not a proven mechanism.

What actually goes wrong, physically

Set against general equestrian injury data, the ceremony's numbers are not extreme, most riding-related injuries still happen from falls during ordinary riding, not from ceremonies (Neville, Hicks & Neville, 2024); but the German survey did find that more than 7% of riders and a similar share of horses had been involved in an accident at an award ceremony at some point in their show career, and that almost a third of respondents had witnessed another rider or horse get hurt at one. Kicks were the rarest behaviour observed but the most frequent cause of injury when they happened, consistent with separate clinical research showing that equine kicks, while infrequent, tend to be precise and forceful enough to cause real harm (Eckert et al., 2011).

Dressage and showjumping aren't equally affected

The survey found a clear split by discipline. Showjumping riders were calmer at the ceremony than dressage riders, and their horses were rated as more relaxed too. Habituation offers one explanation: showjumping crowds are already loud during the round itself, so the horses arrive at the ceremony somewhat used to noise and movement, while dressage is ridden in near-silence.

That explanation needs a caveat, though: habituation to noise isn't something every horse develops simply through exposure. A 2022 survey of over 1,800 horse owners found that horses already prone to severe noise anxiety didn't improve with repeated exposure to unpredictable loud events, while only the mildly anxious group tended to settle over time (Riva et al., 2022). So repeated exposure to a loud arena may calm some show jumping horses without doing much for others: habituation is a partial explanation, not a guarantee.

A second, posture-specific factor may also be at work. A large share of competitive dressage horses are ridden with the head behind the vertical, a position commonly called hyperflexion. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of 58 peer-reviewed studies found that the large majority raised welfare concerns about this posture, most often tied to restricted vision and impaired breathing (König von Borstel et al., 2024). An earlier controlled study had already shown that horses ridden in a forced version of this posture displayed more stress and fear behaviour than horses ridden with a more open neck position (von Borstel et al., 2009). Neither study looked at award ceremonies specifically, but the mechanism is plausible: a horse whose forward vision and breathing are already compromised during the test may simply have less capacity to cope when the ceremony adds noise, movement and unfamiliar handling on top.

It's worth noting, as an open question rather than a settled answer, that horse racing's winner's circle ceremonies are at least as loud and crowded, yet racehorses don't appear to bolt there with the same frequency reported for the equestrian lap of honour. Whether that comes down to riding posture, different handling at the moment of the ceremony, selection for temperament, or simply a lack of comparable data, is not something the current literature answers. This is a gap worth flagging rather than a conclusion worth drawing.

What could be done differently

The authors of the German study point to a few concrete options, none of them radical: enforcing real distance between horse-and-rider pairs during the lap of honour, since proximity is what turns a kick into a likely event rather than a possible one; letting judges grant exemptions more readily for horses that are clearly struggling; and, where the format allows it, moving the ceremony itself to a podium on foot rather than requiring every placed horse to take part mounted. None of this removes the horse from the spotlight, but it shifts the format toward something closer to what the Five Domains model of animal welfare asks for: weighing the animal's physical and mental state as deliberately as the spectacle (Hemsworth et al., 2015; Mellor & Burns, 2020).

The regulatory gap

None of this evidence has, so far, changed the rulebook. Germany's national equestrian federation still lists the award ceremony, lap of honour included, as a compulsory part of the performance test. The researchers behind the 2022 study were careful not to call for banning mounted ceremonies outright, just over half of the riders they surveyed actually supported keeping participation compulsory, provided exceptions remained available. What the data argue for is narrower and harder to dismiss: an event built largely around tradition and spectator appeal is, on the evidence collected so far, producing more stress in horses than the competition it follows.

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Debora Cinganelli is an equine neuroethologist and welfare consultant with a multidisciplinary background spanning ethology, animal physiology, and equine nutrition. She holds an MSc in Ethology, specialising in neuroethology.

She is a member of the International Society for Equitation Science (ISES), the International Society for Applied Ethology (ISAE), and the International Society for Neuroethology (ISN).

Her work centres on the integration of behavioural neuroscience, physical health, and nutrition into a coherent, evidence-based approach to equine welfare in management and training.

Through her practice, Path to Bloom, she offers behavioural and management consultations, educational programmes, and science communication aimed at translating peer-reviewed research into accessible, practical knowledge for horse owners and practitioners.

Learn more about her work here or via her Instagram account @pathtobloom.equine.

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References

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