I am not a fan of everything the FEI does, but sympathise with them over the Global Champions League (GCL).
The FEI and Global Champions Tour (GCT) have uneasily coexisted since 2006, especially after GCT forgot it wasn’t meant to clash with super-league Nations Cups.
That’s when GCT had about eight shows per summer. Now it has 15 and is expanding beyond Europe.
However, proposals for the new, as yet unsanctioned Global Champions League – with riders “bought” and “sold” by commercial teams, as in soccer and Formula 1 – disturbs a much bigger hornets’ nest.
GCL has spared no expense fighting the FEI. They went to the Belgian Competition Court, which has previously ruled against sports exclusivity clauses, and instructed lawyers who won a similar case in soccer.
GCL also hired London public relations giants, Bell Pottinger, adept at wrong-footing the FEI.
Bell Pottinger announced the appeal had failed before the FEI – whose appeal it actually was – had a chance to read the full decision. Then last week they announced the FEI had given GCL the “go-ahead.” Some media outlets reproduced this blurb without questioning the FEI’s surprise u-turn, and thus had themselves to backtrack hours later; the FEI retorted that it had indeed issued a factual statement that participants will not be penalised, as required by the court, but continues to fight GCL “by all legal means.” Alas for the FEI, follow-up stories in conceding media maybe got the first version slightly wrong rarely receives the same prominence.
Amid all this brinkmanship, why did the FEI decline to approve GCL in the first place?
GCL says the FEI is cynically protecting its own commercial interests, notably the Nations Cup, under the veil of horse welfare and fair play. FEI is both regulator and event promoter; this is not the norm. Eventing interests have separately mentioned this conflict to me, too.
But the FEI says it can’t approve any new series without seeing its detailed rules. GCL insists it has supplied them; FEI says it hasn’t – apart from a mere page and a bit in outline.
Certainly little detail about how it will be structured has leaked out, other than the fragments we learned in September 2014 when Scott Brash and Ludger Beerbaum waxed lyrical in a video.
The FEI has laboured that at unsanctioned events, horse welfare cannot be guaranteed. Thus, GCL seemed to bend over backwards to provide assurances and invited the FEI to supervise GCL’s welfare and anti-doping aspects. Though that may have impressed the court it was hardly a major concession because the GCL class will take place within an existing, FEI-approved GCT show!
What worries me, though, has little to do with the jumping.
The court’s interim decision applies only to GCL. However, if the FEI loses when the full merits of the case are eventually tested, its authority will be irreparably weakened overall, as indeed will that of other sports bodies no doubt keeping an anxious eye. Skating has a similar exclusivity issue and, unlike the FEI, was proposing a life ban for athletes participating in unsanctioned events, not a mere six months!
Francesco Ricci Bitti, president of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations, can “see both sides” though says “in sports there is a very, very good reason to have co-ordinated, sanctioned activities.”
The elephant in the room is that this is easing the way for unauthorised-anything; for a start, we’ll have unregulated endurance in the Middle East and other regions where disposable-horse endurance is also taking off.
It’s possible, of course, that the GCT machine is so self-absorbed, like many other pockets of equestrianism, that it hasn’t followed the endurance scandals (despite endurance being so popular with its major collaborator, Qatar).
A few weeks ago, I emailed Bell Pottinger explaining why I was concerned about the wider ramifications. They told me that “in the complaint, the final request for relief is an order to ‘prohibit the FEI from – directly or indirectly – banning or in any other way sanctioning athletes, horses and/or officials from participating in any non-FEI approved event, provided that the organiser of the events has committed to comply with the FEI rules regarding horse welfare and integrity of competition (anti-doping) or an equivalent set of rules.’” Ergo, there is nothing to worry about, as every organiser of an unsanctioned event is obliged to be decent and horse-friendly.
That is spectacularly naïve. We have already seen that a “legally-binding” agreement signed by the UAE to uphold horse welfare, in this case as a condition of lifting a suspension, is worth diddly. On the first weekend alone of the current winter UAE season, 21 yellow warning cards were dished out. Ever since, more rule violations and at least six horse fatalities since October have been advised to the FEI endurance department. How much longer can it surely be before the UAE is suspended again? (Since this blog was first published, the FEI advises that so far this season four horses have been advised as CI (Catastrophically Injured). A further two listed on FEI results as CI are, happily, still alive).
Can points-buying be curtailed?
Meanwhile, commercial jumping teams sound like a fun idea, but will spectators really get into it? We know, from all the OIympic format reviews that the general public doesn’t understand team competitions in horse sport. This GCL sounds even more complicated as only two riders per team will compete at a time, I believe.
TV viewers may be hooked by it all, but GCT doesn’t actively encourage normal members of the public to turn up and watch in person, ironic given the emphasis on sunny, glamorous locations, potentially a lovely day out.
There is a fine balance between presenting a magical spectator experience and reinforcing perceptions that jumping is for the super-rich. A lot of GCT revenue comes from VIP hospitality, often occupying three sides of the arena. Media attention is as much about spot-the-celebrity – Bruce Springsteen, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg – as to what happens on the field of play.
Indeed, when GCT launched in London in 2013, one friend was reminded of turning up at a smart party only to make the horrible discovery she’d been asked as a waitress, not a guest. I am not sure that’s the route we should be going when the IOC wants equestrianism to appear less elite.
GCT invites the world’s top 30, but there is also a very large proportion of lower-ranked riders on organiser’s invitations or “pay-cards” – not even the FEI knows exactly how many – rumoured to cost over $50,000 per rider per show. This is another part of GCT’s business model.
Of 49 starters in the opening class at the Vienna GCT in September, for instance, 20 were ranked well below 100, seven well below 300. I can’t, of course, assert that all of them were pay-cardees, though a glance at FEI records show that not many of them ride in 5* or even 4* shows when not at GCTs. Riders ranked 35-100 often have to pay-to-play, too, of course at GCT and elsewhere.
This in itself fosters welfare issues, by giving some riders an inflated idea of their ability to pop round a 5*on a horse they’ve only recently bought. A couple of times, friends living in the French Riviera have accompanied me to the Cannes GCT. Though not horsey, they observed there seemed to be a very wide raft of ability – what the FEI calls “bad pictures” – confusingly on display a sporting event purported to represent the world’s best.
Though GCT was not mentioned by name, at the FEI sports forum in April, FEI show jumping committee chair John Madden decried the practice of “buying points,” and wanted opportunities to compete at top tier shows to be “based on talent and hard work, not the size of someone’s wallet.” This was a criticism of the heavy use of pay cards in general, not just GCT.
The FEI is already considering making the Nations Cup the main mechanism for WEG qualification, maybe also the Olympic Games. In a recent survey of national federations, the 47 respondents – which included all the principal jumping nations bar Qatar – mostly thought 5-10% was a fair cap on OC invitations. That sounds a fair bit below the perceived GCT model, and something altogether more difficult to challenge through the courts.
The FEI is also considering relating rankings points to the quality of the field. At a rough calculation, Scott Brash and Kent Farrington would still be the world number one and two without using any Longines rankings points won at GCT shows. But will the folk teetering around the top 30 divide be quite so keen to base most of their summer round pay-card shows if the ranking points accruable were halved? During the April forum, the German federation wanted it to go even further, with a sliding scale: the more pay-cardees per show, the less ranking points there should be, including nought!
Certainly, the hiatus over GCL has prodded more debate than before about Global Champions formulae in general. Down the line, GCT may wish it had left well alone.
