Cheltenham move off fence for safety reasons
Reshaping the landscape of British Flat racing has become the subject of feverish activity this year, as the brains’ trust of the sport attempt to increase its public appeal.
There appears to be no such troubles for jump racing but the course that many consider as its spiritual home has been working on a restructuring of a physical nature.
Cheltenham opens for its new season tomorrow and the most striking difference will be the repositioning of the second-last fence on the Old Course.
The fence had previously stood on the downhill run to the home turn and had been a place of high drama, where many of the result races were changed violently but, also, fatally. One such example was the fall of Granit Jack in the Paddy Power Chase in 2007. The five-year-old appeared to have jumped the fence well enough but then stumbled and was killed by the fall.
Those who follow jump racing are always mindful of the devil’s pact that the sport demands; the thrill of the horses jumping at speed balanced by the price that is paid for that spectacle. The racecourse executive has not been complacent in trying to make the test at Cheltenham an honest one and have reviewed this fence several times.
Now they have moved the fence into the straight, which means that it will largely replicate the configuration of the New Course.
Simon Claisse, Cheltenham’s director of racing, was an amateur rider himself and his risk assessment is backed up by his own experience. He believes that this solution will work for the benefit of safety and spectacle too from the previous layout which had only one fence in the last two furlongs. “We moved fence 14, the second last, on the Old Course as the fence continued to have a significantly high and unacceptable faller rate,” he explained.
“We keep details of all the fallers at all the fences and, while measures we took to try and improve things at the fence in the past delivered a marginal improvement, the faller rate tended to revert back to where we were before.
“What seems to have happened is a lot of horses jumped the fence perfectly well and either took half a stride and stumbled or took a whole stride and then stumbled. We could not allow this to continue to happen as a horse was seven times more likely to fall at the second last than at any other fence on the Old Course.
“We looked again at moving this fence around the corner into the straight and have done so. We now have two tracks, the Old and New Courses, which look very similar in terms of where the fences are. The other advantage is that we bring the fence much closer to the spectators.”
There were no spectators when the new configuration was given its first test on a foggy morning two weeks ago but it was given the thumbs-up, even by those who had to pick themselves from the ground first to do so.
“We asked Nigel Twiston-Davies some time ago to send horses down for a schooling session over the new obstacle. They jumped the plain fence and ditch on the back straight and came down the hill over the third last,” Claisse said.
“They were going very fast and seven horses came around the corner - Paddy Brennan, Carl Llewellyn, David England, Sam Waley-Cohen and Sam Twiston-Davies were among those riding - and the bend rode beautifully and they jumped the fence.
“We were happy but Nigel’s gang wanted to do it again. So they went back up the hill to the third last and one of the senior jockeys who is now retired said they went off with their tails on fire.
“We could hear them coming and the first horse hit the fence pretty hard and fell and brought down two others. So we had three jockeys and horses on the deck - fortunately they all got up and were fine and they made some positive remarks about what we had done.”
Brennan, who has three rides over the course on the first day of the meeting, said: “The ground has never been better and the new fence could not be in a better place. You will still get fallers as it is the second last but they won’t be so severe.”
Carl Llewellyn, now assistant trainer to Twiston-Davies, can draw on the memories of his own career, which spanned the time when safety was often a second thought at best. “I think the fence will be a great improvement,” he said. “It rides nicely off the bend with plenty of room between the two fences. It will be safer all round.”
A spectacle and a safer option; something of a no-brainer really.
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