The board of the Italian Equestrian Federation has approved to adopt a variation of the "HiLo drop" for its national dressage scoring, despite international lobbying from several countries against the new system, which will be voted upon at the 2017 FEI General Assembly on 18 - 21 November 2017.
Lobbying Against HiLo Drop
The Dressage Judging Working Group (DJWG) has proposed the HiLo drop for approval at the 2017 FEI General Assembly in Montevideo, Uruguay, next week.
However several national federation, such as Germany and the U.S.A., have been mobilizing its elite dressage riders to openly speak out against the system as their way of lobbying against the change. Paradoxically those star riders are hardly ever curtailed or affected by deviant scoring. This mostly happens with the judging at pony, junior, young rider and small tour level.
The HiLo drop has been developed as an improvement and fine-tuning of the current dressage judging system. The highest and lowest score PER MOVEMENT would be dropped to prevent major deviations between individual judges on a panel.
For the majority of cases the effect is tiny, much smaller than the actual precision of a Dressage result. But for cases where one judge is “always” high or low for a given rider, or indeed is very different from that of their colleagues, the effect on the result will be significant and it will then represent more the consensus view with a reduced influence from any single judge.
Italy Moves Ahead with HiLo Drop Variety
The Italian Equestrian Federation (FISE) is one of few countries which has taken a positive stance to the HiLo drop and have already voted their own adapted system for national shows. As of 2018 the Italian Federation will approve a score correction of the deviant FINAL score of a judge.
The FISE board explains its decsision as folllowing:
Having taken into consideration the introduction by FEI of the so called “Hi/lo drops” which provides for elimination of the lowest and the highest mark for each lesson of a dressage test and that the purpose of the above “Hi/lo drops” is to reduce substantially the negative effect of differences in results amongst judges in accordance to the principle that the judges panel constitutes a TEAM and therefore the opinion of the majority of the members of the Team should always prevail despite any other consideration.
The adoption of the above “Hi/lo drops” implies a substantial modification to the present software in use by Dressage Organization Entities with a likely important financial burden to meet such a change.
Considering all the above it is proposed to introduce an alternative system which first of all will not be applicable to all those cases where no correction would be necessary and mostly will become a sort of “protection or safety net” for riders and judges in those cases where a 5% or more difference from the result of an individual judge in respect of the final result arise.
In that case the correction will be applied only at the final result, changing the “odd result” to the closest result of any of the other member of Grand Jury.
Italian 5*judge Enzo Truppa heavily supported this modification.
"The above new system will not require a major modification to existing software and could even be applied manually though calculation of people in charge for releasing results," Truppa stated.
It has been proposed to introduce the above system with immediate effect from the date of official resolution by the FISE Board on a trial basis of 6 months only to competitions where 5 judges or more are officiating, with exclusion of competitions for young horses where the current system continues to be applied.
Related Links
HiLo Drop: Why the Dressage Judging Working Group Proposes this Trimmed Mean System
David Stickland: A Tale of Two Competitions
Trond Asmyr: "The 6% Rule Automatically For All"