The Five-Star Groom

Luxury accomodation for the horses. Somewhere to put the human.

At 4.30 in the morning at a five-star show, the horses are already being prepared for the day. Stable doors open along the row as grooms move quietly between them, carrying feed buckets, rugs and armfuls of hay, while the first lorries begin to stir in the darkness. Inside one of the immaculate temporary stables, a horse worth more than most people will earn in a lifetime is eating breakfast from a spotless bucket. Twenty metres away, its groom is wondering whether the shower in the accommodation block has produced any hot water yet. There is something rather revealing about an industry that can organise the temporary accommodation of a million-euro horse down to the last bale of bedding, while the human being responsible for it may be considerably less certain where they are sleeping that night.

This is not universally the case, and there are plenty of riders, owners, yards and organisers who provide excellent conditions for their grooms. But anyone who has spent enough time around international equestrian sport will recognise the gap between the glamorous version of the groom's life and the one involving actual work.

The groom is generally the first person awake and the last one finished. They unload at the

other end of the journey, muck out, prepare feed, walk horses, plait, wash, tack up, cool down, check legs, find missing boots and notice the small changes that can become rather large problems if nobody notices them. They know which horse eats slowly, which one refuses unfamiliar water, which one needs the left hind checked again and which one will remove its carefully applied stable bandage approximately fourteen seconds after it has been put on.

They also know where the horse passports are, which is possibly the most important professional qualification of all.

It is a considerable amount of responsibility for a profession that has traditionally been sold with a rather romantic description of itself: travel the world, work with top horses, be part of an elite team. All of which sounds marvellous until you discover that travelling the world can mean sleeping in the back of a lorry, working until midnight and getting up at four, while being part of an elite team occasionally involves discovering that the washing machine has flooded the bathroom again.

The sport has, to its credit, begun to recognise that this is not really good enough.

In 2024, the FEI and a group of stakeholder organisations signed the FEI Grooms Charter, setting out principles around the role of grooms and their contribution to equestrian sport. Among other things, the Charter states that grooms should be respected and supported and should work in a safe environment that respects their mental and physical wellbeing, as well as their fundamental human and labour or employment rights, both at home and at shows.

This is excellent news, although it does rather ruin the old argument that nobody had ever thought about the groom.

The GEF, naturally, has its own version.

Theirs is beautifully presented, professionally designed and available in several languages, with the sort of reassuring vocabulary that makes everybody feel that something important has happened. There are references to respect, support, safety, wellbeing and professional development, all of which are excellent words and look particularly good when printed on thick paper.

Dr Leila Al-Farsi of the World Equestrian Welfare Organisation was delighted when she read it.

She was particularly pleased by the reference to fundamental labour and employment rights.

Then she asked who was responsible for making sure those rights actually existed.

There was a pause. Someone mentioned the reporting mechanism. Someone else mentioned the action plan.

Leila looked at them over her glasses and asked whether a groom could report their employer without worrying about what might happen to their job afterwards.

The pause became considerably longer.

Somewhere in GEF headquarters, another working group quietly formed.

The real FEI Action Plan is, to be fair, considerably more constructive than that. It recognises the need to improve trust in the reporting process, review the role of stewards in relation to grooms and their facilities, and develop practical measures to support the principles of the Charter. The FEI also has a reporting mechanism through which grooms can raise concerns during FEI events, including concerns about facilities and accommodation.

All of which is sensible.

It also leaves us with the awkward question sitting underneath almost every reporting system involving an employee and their employer: how safe does somebody feel when they complain about the person who controls their future employment?

Imagine being a young groom working for a rider or owner whose horses you travel with around the world. Your accommodation is dreadful, your hours are excessive, you are on minimum wage and the facilities are inadequate. Perhaps you are not being treated particularly well. Perhaps you are being treated very badly. You know who employs you, who decides whether you come on the next trip and who is likely to be asked for a reference when you eventually want another job.

You may also know that the horse standing in the stable next door is worth several million euros.

Pressing the reporting button suddenly looks rather less straightforward. Especially if you are miles from home in another country and don't know how you will get home.

This is the part of groom welfare that doesn't fit particularly neatly into a glossy brochure, because the international equestrian world is not one employment jurisdiction. The legal protections available to a groom vary according to where they work, who employs them and what contractual arrangements are in place. The FEI can establish expectations within its sporting structure, but it is not an international employment tribunal with the power to arrive at somebody's yard, demand the payslips and announce that the leaky caravan with a dodgy floor is going to have to do better.

Which brings us rather neatly back to accommodation.

There is something faintly surreal about the amount of thought that goes into ensuring a valuable horse has a suitable temporary home while the human responsible for its welfare is sometimes expected to make do with whatever happens to be available.

At the Paris Olympics, grooms had dedicated accommodation close to the equestrian venue, with the groom accommodation at Huttopia just 700 metres from the stables. That seems entirely reasonable. The person who has to be at the stable at dawn is, after all, considerably more useful when they are actually capable of getting there.

Other competitions have their own arrangements, with some event schedules specifying organiser-provided accommodation, meals and sanitary facilities for grooms. That is useful too, because it demonstrates that decent provision is not some utopian fantasy dreamed up by people who have never organised a horse show. It is something an organiser can simply decide matters.

Nobody is suggesting that every groom needs a complimentary suite at the Ritz.

A clean bed would be a perfectly respectable starting point. A working hot shower would be welcome. Food appearing regularly would seem fair. A safe place to sleep, adequate sanitary facilities and working conditions that recognise that a human being is doing a physically demanding job for very long hours would hardly constitute an outrageous benefits package.

These are not luxury demands. They are the sort of things most people would regard as the minimum requirements for asking somebody to turn up and do their job.

The economics become particularly strange when you consider how much of elite horse sport depends on the groom's knowledge. The rider may be the person in the spotlight, but the groom is often the one who knows that the horse is not quite right before anybody else notices. They know its habits, its temperament, its appetite, its little peculiarities and the difference between he's being naughty today and something isn't right.

That knowledge takes years to acquire, and it cannot be replaced simply by putting another enthusiastic twenty-year-old in a branded jacket.

Which is perhaps why the industry's habit of describing grooming as a passion deserves a little more scrutiny.

Passion is a wonderful thing. It will get you through a 5am start, a flooded lorry park and the discovery that somebody has forgotten the horse's competition boots.

It will not, unfortunately, pay the rent.

There is a slightly uncomfortable habit in equestrian sport of assuming that people who love horses will tolerate conditions they would never accept in another profession. The young groom is passionate, therefore the sixteen-hour day becomes part of the adventure. The experienced groom is dedicated, therefore poor accommodation becomes something to put up with. The travelling is glamorous, therefore nobody mentions that the glamorous bit is generally taking place several hundred metres away while someone else is mucking out.

And this is where the welfare argument becomes rather more complicated than simply asking whether the horse is being treated properly.

If we genuinely believe that good horse welfare depends upon skilled, attentive and knowledgeable people, then the welfare of those people cannot be entirely separated from the welfare of the horse. An exhausted groom is not in the best position to notice a subtle change in behaviour. Someone who is constantly rushing is more likely to miss something. Someone who is frightened of losing their job is hardly in the ideal position to tell an influential employer that something is wrong.

The Charter recognises that grooms are essential contributors to the sport.

Now the sport has to decide whether that is a nice sentence or an actual principle.

Because a charter is a promise, and an action plan is only as useful as what happens after everyone has finished congratulating themselves on producing it.

Perhaps the next stage is therefore not another beautifully designed document explaining what grooms deserve, but making sure that a groom can actually say, This isn't acceptable, without wondering whether the person reading the complaint controls their next job.

After all, we have become extremely good at creating systems in which a groom can report that a horse has been mistreated. It might be time to make sure the groom can report that they have been mistreated too.

And perhaps, when the horse has its immaculate stable, its carefully prepared feed and its welfare team, somebody could spare a thought for the person standing outside the stable door at five in the morning.

The horse may be the athlete, but the groom is the one making sure it gets to the start line.