An international panel of experts assembled by the Fédération Equestre Internationale to better protect riders from head injuries released a report on its work Friday that sets an ambitious, “aspirational” goal: Cutting the rate of riding-related concussions in half by strengthening equestrian helmet testing standards, and beginning to get those new standards—and new helmets that meet them—in place internationally within the next five years. 

The FEI’s Helmet Working Group, assembled in April, last week released a set of key proposals intended to better align helmet testing protocols with the nature of riding-related head injuries and align those testing standards across multiple international testing organizations.

“Falls are much more complicated than a simple testing mechanism where you drop the helmet on the ground, and falls happen over a much longer period of time than a lot of the testing does,” said FEI Medical Committee Chairman Mark Hart, MD, who also leads the U.S. Equestrian Federation’s Human and Equine Safety and Welfare Committee.

Current research, like that done at the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, has shown that head injuries sustained in horseback riding falls typically happen from a height of 2.2 meter or so (roughly the height of a mounted rider) and involve both translational (i.e., the linear drop from the saddle to the ground) and rotational force. It also shows that the impact, or energy transmission, in riding falls can be much longer than that replicated in most modern helmet tests—150 milliseconds versus the 10 or 20 replicated in an anvil-drop helmet test, for example, Hart said.

“There’s a lot of really great work going on [amongst helmet manufacturers and testing organizations], and we didn’t want to try and criticize it or claim that we know any better,” said Hart’s colleague David Vos, Ph.D., the U.S.-based chairman of the FEI Helmet Working Group. “All we said was, look, we really, really will do well to consider testing that takes into account, more realistically, what the likely impact is going to be.”

To that end, the working group’s recommendations include several key proposals for future helmet testing protocols:

• Using a 45-degree angle anvil test (different, for example, from the vertical drop anvil test ASTM International currently uses to certify riding helmets in the U.S.) from a 2.2-meter drop height to test a helmet’s performance against both translational and rotational force from the approximate height of a rider sitting horseback.

• Testing multiple sites on the helmet.

• Standardizing “test lines,” or the area of the head (imagine a shower cap) covered by every testing body.

• Standardizing the use of the latest headforms in testing.

• Requiring new helmets to meet most current certification requirements from at least two testing bodies, such as Snell, ASTM, PAS (Great Britain) or EN (Europe).

• Including compression-load testing to assess performance against crushing injuries.

“We’re not trying to say ‘do something new,’ ” Vos said, emphasizing the working group—which includes representatives from helmet manufacturers and testing organizations—is “super respectful” of what testers and manufacturers have been doing already to innovate. “We’re trying to say what you’re doing sounds really good, keep doing it. But as you’re doing that, please consider this translational and rotational test because the combined case is much more realistic, A, and B, evidence-wise shows strong correlation with brain injury.”

Along with updating helmet-testing protocols to reflect the most current head-injury research, the group hopes to entice testing organizations to adopt more uniform standards so that manufacturers and international riders alike aren’t dealing with the frustration of meeting different standards in different places, Hart said.

“Our heads are the same, gravity is the same, and dirt is the same,” he said. “It would be nice at some point, if we can nudge the different organizations [to] come up with common equestrian criteria as research becomes available and technologies come available. 

“A harmonization of the standards would be in favor of us,” he continued, “because if manufacturers have a little bit more room for research and development, then they can spend the money on that instead of going through six different tests.”

The testing organizations, the manufacturers, the FEI and riders themselves all have the same goal—keeping riders as safe as possible—so achieving that harmonization should be achievable, he said.

Along with improving testing protocols and unifying testing standards internationally, the working group is pushing for an improved injury reporting system at FEI competitions to help generate real-world information and statistics that could assist overall safety efforts. 

“If manufacturers make changes, and standard bodies, we as the FEI make changes, can we measure those changes? We need a better mechanism to be able to look at that,” Hart said. 

“Injuries, fortunately, are not super frequent. So when you have an infrequent event with serious complications, it’s important to get that data to know what to do,” he added. “When the unfortunate falls happen, can we learn valuable lessons from those and then translate that into improved materials? [Improved] testing protocols to make sure those helmets are sound? We need to do this on a worldwide basis, because no country by itself has enough falls that you could statistically look at the data … and, again, our common goal is through this we need to share this information. This needs to be very transparent. So the FEI feels strongly, as the international governing body, that we would like to create a system that’s easy to get the data into and is accurate.”

The working group’s goal of reducing concussion rates by half comes from FEI eventing statistics, which indicated a rider concussion rate of 1 per approximately 69 falls—or 1 per 1,263 starts—worldwide in 2022, and aims to move that to 1 in 2,500 starts in the future.

“This would represent significant progress in helmet performance and might well be achievable thorugh judicious selection of the performance characteristics and thresholds,” the group states in the Dec. 7 report listing its key recommendations. “We recognize the goal is aggressive and will work with the broader community with timely review and adjustment of performance requirements over time along the road to reaching this objective.”

Hart acknowledged the goal is “aspirational” and said the FEI hopes to use its position as the sport’s international governing body to rally together independent organizations in different countries in meeting what is already a common goal, then move forward and continue innovating for improved safety as new research and improved testing and materials allow.

“We created this as a group of various stakeholders that hopefully will come together make these recommendations over time, as new information becomes available, to help the helmet manufacturers create better helmets, to help the standards organizations have improved testing that then can be translated back to the manufacturers, and the riders know that we’re working to always make it better,” he said. “This is not, we’re done in one year and it’s over.”

Read the working group’s complete report here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misnamed the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab.