Two young riders asked the court to re-rank them for the Youth Olympics, and the Chief Justice declines

Having argued that consistency means repeatedly scoring eight penalties or fewer, one appellant could not then call that benchmark arbitrary when it cost him a place. Both appeals are dismissed.

On 24 September 2026 a Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia decided two Letters Patent Appeals arising from the selection of India’s show jumping representatives for the Youth Olympic Games 2026. Both were dismissed, and both leave the Federation’s decision standing.

How the selection ran

The governance of the Equestrian Federation of India is with an Ad Hoc Committee. The selection criteria assessed athletes on the technical difficulty and level of competitions completed, consistency of international performance, recency of results relative to the Games, stability of the horse-rider combination, and championship readiness.

In May 2026 the international federation confirmed that seven Indian riders, including the appellant, held valid Certificates of Capability for the Games. In June all seven were told they were on the long list and were required to submit their latest competition results and performance records by 25 July. The final selection, the email said, would be based on an objective assessment of recent performances, consistency of results, competitiveness at CSI1* and CSI2* events, and overall merit.

A clarification issued in July narrowed what would count: only results obtained at CSI1*/CSI2* events at a minimum height of 130 cm would be considered for the minimum eligibility requirement and for performance consistency.

The appellant competed at the Portugal Summer Tour in the 130 cm Medium Class in mid-July, completing five rounds, and submitted those results before the cut-off along with a performance summary addressing recency, consistency, competitiveness at CSI2* level and overall merit — including his earlier shortlisting for the Asian Youth Games 2025.

A Show Jumping Selection Committee was constituted on 17 July. What it decided, described in the judgment as Selection Decision II, is what the writ petition and then these appeals attacked.

The eight-penalty threshold

The first ground was that the Committee had applied a threshold of eight penalties which was not part of the published criteria, or which belonged only to the eligibility stage rather than to selection.

The Bench rejected it on three bases, and the first is the most pointed. The threshold was not introduced for the first time in Selection Decision II — it is the very standard the appellant himself relied on, both in his representation and in his submissions to the Court, where he pleaded that consistency of performance connotes repeatedly low penalties at or below eight points. Having invoked that standard to demonstrate his own consistency, he could not contend that its application to determine a qualifying performance made the decision arbitrary.

Second, the criteria did not preclude reliance on an established, objective external benchmark for assessing consistency and championship readiness at the selection stage.

Third, and decisively on fairness, the threshold was applied uniformly to every rider — including the appellant, whose own 12-penalty result from 18 July was excluded on exactly the same basis. A standard applied without exception to all riders, the judgment holds, cannot be characterised as one-sided.

Count of qualifying rounds, or average penalties?

The appellant’s central contention was that riders ought to have been ranked by average penalties rather than by the number of qualifying performances. On his arithmetic, that would have placed him differently.

The Court declined to accept it, and the reasoning is transferable well beyond equestrian sport.

Consistency ordinarily denotes the repetition of a prescribed standard of performance across a body of results. It cannot be reduced to an arithmetical average derived from however few results a rider elects to submit. An average based on a limited sample may unduly favour a rider who competes less frequently — the competitor who enters three events and does well in all three would outrank one who enters twelve and performs to standard in nine.

Where a selection body has to compare athletes who choose their own competition calendars, counting qualifying performances measures something an average cannot.

The companion appeal

The second appeal, heard and decided by the same Bench on the same day, attacked the same Selection Decision from a different direction — seeking to have the order of merit redrawn by treating a particular date as the opening date for consideration of results.

That failed for want of material. In the absence of anything establishing that date as the commencement of the relevant period, the relief sought could not be granted, and the Bench found no good ground to interfere with the Single Judge’s conclusion declining to disturb the minutes, the resolution and the selection decision that followed from them.

The standard of review

What both appeals came down to is the limit of what a court does with a selection dispute. The Single Judge had held that Selection Decision II was neither mala fide, arbitrary, perverse nor contrary to the notified criteria, and had rightly declined to interfere. The Division Bench found no merit in the challenge to that conclusion.

The appeals were dismissed, with pending applications disposed of and no order as to costs.

That framing is the whole of it. A court asked to review a selection is not asked whether the athlete deserved to go. It asks whether the body applied the criteria it published, applied them to everyone alike, and reached a conclusion a reasonable body could reach. On this record the answer to all three was yes — and the appellant's own definition of consistency was the benchmark that decided it.