Dressage Judging: Five or Seven People Sitting in Different Places on Purpose

The panel is spread out because the view matters

Most judged sports seat their panel together, facing the performance from one direction — gymnastics, figure skating, snowboarding.

Dressage does the opposite. Judges are positioned at different points around the arena, and their marks are combined.

The reason is optical, not procedural. From the end of the arena, at C, a judge can see straightness — whether the horse’s hindquarters track the forehand, whether it is travelling on one line or two. That is invisible from the side.

From the side, a judge can see rhythm, length of stride, the height of a hind leg, the angle of a shoulder — everything about how the horse is moving through its body, which is very hard to assess head-on.

Neither position sees the whole test. So dressage does not choose between them; it appoints judges to both and averages.

The seven-judge geometry

When seven judges are used, the two additional ones sit at the short side opposite the judge at C, five metres from and on the inside of the prolongation of the long sides.

That specification is doing precise work. Five metres inside the line of the long side puts each judge at an oblique angle — not straight down the centre line, and not square to the side.

An oblique view is the one that catches what the other two positions miss: whether a horse that looks straight from the end and correct from the side is in fact slightly crooked, or slightly behind the vertical, in a way only visible from a corner.

The FEI is not adding judges to reduce variance. It is adding viewpoints.

Which creates a problem the sport lives with

Averaging judges who genuinely see different things is not the same as averaging judges who see the same thing differently.

In snowboarding, all six judges watch the same run from the same place, so a disagreement is a difference of opinion, and dropping the extremes is defensible.

In dressage, a judge at C and a judge on the side may score the same movement differently because one of them could see something the other could not. The disagreement may be informative rather than noisy — and averaging discards that information.

This is the structural reason dressage scores are argued about more than most. Wide spreads between judges are frequently reported as evidence of bias, when some of the spread is the system working as designed.

‘General Impression’ becomes ‘Harmony’

Alongside marks for individual movements, dressage awards collective marks for the test as a whole.

From 2026, General Impression is replaced by Harmony, broadened to cover harmony, cooperation, lightness, effectiveness and sensitivity of the aids, and adherence to the Training Scale.

That is more than a rename, and the direction is unmistakable.

“General impression” is a mark for how it looked. It invites a judge to reward a performance that was imposing, and imposing is achievable by force.

“Harmony”, defined as cooperation and sensitivity of the aids, is a mark for how it was produced. A horse driven through a test by strong riding may still look impressive; it will not look cooperative, and the aids will not look light.

By naming the components, the FEI has made the collective mark answerable. A judge awarding a high Harmony score for a tense horse and heavy hands is now visibly marking against the definition rather than exercising taste.

Why the sport is rewriting this now

Dressage has faced sustained public criticism over training methods and horse welfare, and the FEI’s 2026 package sits directly in that context.

Alongside the Harmony change, the FEI Board approved a task force to review rule proposals on horse condition — welfare, abuse of horse, the grounds for penalties and elimination — with the aim of a multidisciplinary consensus. Updated judging guidelines are due for 2027.

The 2026 changes themselves are deliberately minor, tidying inconsistencies and errors ahead of a full revision. That sequencing tells you the FEI expects the substantive argument to happen in the revision rather than now.

What is already clear is where the pressure is being applied: not on the movements, but on the collective marks — the part of the score that judges the relationship between horse and rider rather than the accuracy of a half-pass.

That is the right place for it. A sport worried about how horses are trained cannot fix it by adjusting the mark for a pirouette. It has to change what the whole performance is rewarded for.

For the other Olympic equestrian disciplines, see eventing rules explained.