ÁINE Power sits at the top table at the Fédération Équestre Internationale (FEI). Growing up in Gowran, Co Kilkenny, she was aware of horse sport, but did not expect to end up where she is, as the Executive Director of Sport and Games at the international governing body for equestrian sports.

She left Ireland in 2010 “for a year” to complete a sports management masters in Switzerland, the place she now calls home, and has experienced four Olympic Games across two sports - boxing and equestrian.

“Gowran is a small village and there are two sports - hurling or horses. My family was more on the hurling side,” Áine told The Irish Field. “I didn’t think at the time, to be honest, that I would end up working in equestrian sport and it is funny how things end up. I was working away in Dublin in a big corporate law firm, and I was about to turn 30 and at a bit of a crossroads wondering what am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

Always crazy for sport, she decided to do the FIFA sports management masters which brought her to the UK, Milan and Switzerland. Once the year was completed, it was her intention to return to Ireland. “The reality is I haven’t ever moved back since! A sports law job came up in the International Boxing Association (IBA) in Lausanne. I worked there for two and a half years and did the London 2012 Olympics with them; I was there when Katie Taylor won her gold medal which was amazing.”

Given the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is located in Lausanne, the Swiss city has attracted most international federations. After two and a half years at the IBA, an opportunity came up at the FEI and Áine joined in 2014 as legal counsel, before being promoted to deputy director of the legal department, as well as working on the allocation of Games, championships and FEI series.

Towards the end of 2024, the top management announced that they were doing a restructure of the FEI. The result saw the creation of two new roles - Executive Director of commercial, marketing and communication and Executive Director of sport and games.

Time for change

When we sat down at the Longines FEI European Championships in A Coruña in mid-July, Áine was preparing to step into the role on August 1st. It’s not a huge change, as Áine explains. “It is a newly-created role, but the comfort is that there’s already very good directors in all of the disciplines. I’m stepping in working with people that I already am used to working with. And nothing needs to be revolutionised, but it’s really making us function better as a wider team.

“I think over the years, perhaps disciplines grew and evolved in their own way, and maybe did not have a harmonised approach to many things; and there are good reasons sometimes. There is a reason why eventing deals with something one way and jumping deals with it another way. But there are other things that we can probably be better on; aligning on that makes us easier as an organisation to deal with.”

Welfare and costs

What are the biggest challenges currently facing the FEI? “We all know equine welfare and well-being is a top priority. It’s disappointing sometimes; every sport has bad actors. Every sport has people who break the rules and kind of dirty the name of the sport and we’ve had our fair share of that over the past couple of years. I think we’re in a very good way of getting on top of it with the equine welfare well-being commission and the dressage working group that’s working specifically on the sport of dressage.

“We have been able to demonstrate - where a horse abuse case happens - that there is more or less a zero-tolerance approach. People have been sanctioned with extremely long bans where it’s been challenged and we’ve been successfully able to defend the majority of those challenges. So, it’s a concern but it’s something that we feel we’re capable of addressing.

“The sport has moved on and public perception has moved on and we can’t close our eyes. There are probably things that maybe 25 years ago were just normal, and now people are saying, going forward, we have to take a look at that again. We have to all acknowledge that and genuinely have to work together on it. There’s no point the FEI implementing something if there’s no buy in, so it’s really trying to find that common ground as to what we can truly tackle and address.”

The rising costs of the sport is also to the forefront of Áine’s mind.

“I think a concern for everybody in the sport is just the costs; the rising costs for organisers putting on shows, for athletes in terms of entry fees, transporting their horses… it’s going in the wrong direction all the time, it’s becoming very expensive.”

The FEI are at the mercy of the general worldwide trends, but they have tried to entice organisers to put their hands up for big events and championships. “We try to be as pragmatic as we can in terms of what we ask of our organisers. We did a big consultation exercise with them at the FEI sports forum two years ago; nothing was off the table. Particularly focusing on the European Championships, we asked do we want to have these championships every two years? Is it feasible? Or should we move to a four-year model like other sports? The feedback was very clear - athletes, federations, stakeholders all wanted them every two years.

“So, we cut the hosting fee by 50% straight away as a very important financial gesture. Because for us, obviously it’s a disaster if an organiser loses a whole lot of money and the word goes around, and then who’s going to put their hands up the next time?”

Olympics in LA

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games was a fantastic showcase for the FEI, in terms of the sport and the venue. “It’s a hard act to follow,” said Áine looking towards Los Angeles in less than three years’ time. “Something the IOC has made really clear is that for equestrian to remain in the Olympic programme, we must be able to deliver all of the disciplines on one site and we can do that in LA with the Santa Anita venue. It’ll probably be a bit more of a challenge in that there’s not the natural kind of vastness of what we had in Paris.”

The sport was faced with a difficult situation when, just the week before the Paris Games, a video of two-time Olympic dressage champion Charlotte Dujardin whipping a horse surfaced online and was picked up by media around the world. “We have to be honest, every time an incident like that happens, it damages our sport. The reality was that, one week before the Games, we’re in the newspapers, not just on the back pages, on the front pages, for all the wrong reasons.

“We have very little margin for error with our sport. We are not athletics, we’re not swimming, we’re not gymnastics, we’re not the ones that bring in the big revenue. So we need to continually justify our place.

"I think the sport in Paris, the images from Versailles, the feedback is the best thing that we can do to guarantee our place in the future. But in LA it will be the same, we need to have sold out venues. We need to be an attractive place for an organiser. We need to demonstrate to the organiser you can make money with our sport.

“We just need to keep working on promoting our sport in general. A venue has been identified for Brisbane 2032 and the Olympic programme for Brisbane will be discussed by the IOC next year. So we will know at an earlier stage in that cycle if equestrian is in the programme, which we’re optimistic about, but it’s continuous. There’s nothing given to us. The more we can show the best things about our sport, the better the chances.”