Flat vs Jump Racing: How Britain's Two Codes Differ
Flat vs jump racing in Britain compared: the obstacles, distances, horses, riders, seasons and courses that separate the two codes under one BHA rulebook.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Racing Explained25 min read
- Shortest Flat races
- 5 furlongs
- Grand National distance
- 4m 2½f
- Starting stalls first used in Britain
- 1965
- Official name of jump racing
- National Hunt
The shortest races run under the Rules of Racing in Britain cover five furlongs and are over in about a minute. The longest, the Grand National at Aintree, is four miles and two and a half furlongs with thirty fences in the way, and takes nine. Both are horse racing, both are licensed by the British Horseracing Authority, and they belong to two codes that share a rulebook and not a great deal else.
Flat racing has no obstacles. Its races run from five furlongs to a little over two miles five furlongs, on turf or on an artificial all-weather surface, and the horses break from starting stalls. Jump racing, officially called National Hunt racing, sends its runners over hurdles or fences across distances from about two miles up to the National's four and a quarter, on turf, from a tape. The horses are older, the weights heavier, the riders taller and the season arranged the other way round. Nearly every difference between the two can be traced to the presence or absence of something to jump.
Flat vs jump racing at a glance: the differences in one table
A racegoer who walked off the July Course at Newmarket in midsummer and into Cheltenham the following March would recognise the parade ring, the weighing room and the number cloths. Very little else would look familiar. The pace is different, the shape of the horses is different, and so is the noise a crowd makes when a favourite meets the last fence wrong.
| Point of comparison | Flat | Jump (National Hunt) |
|---|---|---|
| Obstacles | None | Hurdles or fences, except in National Hunt Flat races |
| Distances | 5 furlongs to about 2m 5f | About 2 miles to 4m 2½f |
| Surface | Turf or all-weather | Turf |
| Start | Stalls, with a numbered draw | Tape and flag, no draw |
| Youngest runners | Two-year-olds | Three-year-olds over hurdles, four-year-olds over fences |
| Lowest weight in handicaps | 8st 2lb | 10st 2lb |
| Core season | Spring to autumn | Autumn to spring |
| Best-known meetings | Royal Ascot, the Derby meeting at Epsom | Cheltenham Festival, the Grand National meeting |
Distances in both codes are given in miles and furlongs, a furlong being 220 yards, an eighth of a mile; our page on how long a furlong is covers the unit and why racing kept it. On the Flat the range starts at the five-furlong sprint and ends with the Queen Alexandra Stakes on the last day of Royal Ascot, run over two miles, five furlongs and 143 yards, which is the longest Flat race in the British calendar. The Derby, at a mile and a half, sits in the middle and is thought of as a test of stamina.
Over jumps a mile and a half would not be a race at all. The minimum is two miles, give or take: several courses now advertise their shortest trips at half a furlong or so under the round figure, because the distances were re-measured along the line the horses actually take. The Cheltenham Gold Cup is a little over three and a quarter miles and the Grand National is in a category of one.
What the chart cannot show is how much the two codes share. The same stewards sit in judgement at both. Horses are weighed out and in under the same procedure, sampled under the same anti-doping rules and handicapped by the same team at the BHA, although they hold separate ratings for each code. Even the whip rules follow one framework, with the permitted number of strikes set one higher over jumps than on the Flat. The codes are two programmes inside one regulated sport, not two sports.
Hurdle races, steeplechases and the bumper with no jumps at all
Jump racing is three kinds of race, and one of them has nothing to jump.
A hurdle race is run over the smaller obstacles, flights of brush panels that give when a horse hits them. A steeplechase, shortened by everybody to chase, is run over fences, which are taller, wider and rigid. Hurdles come first in most careers and fences later. How the two are built, how many a race must contain and why horses jump them so differently is a subject of its own, and we have given it a separate page on what divides a hurdle from a fence.
The third kind is the National Hunt Flat race, known on every racecourse as the bumper. It is run on the level, usually over about two miles, and it exists to give a young jumping-bred horse a first experience of a racecourse before anyone asks it to leave the ground at speed. Bumpers are confined to horses that have not run in ordinary Flat races, and a horse can only contest a limited number before it has to move on to obstacles.
Why a race without jumps still counts as jumping
The classification follows the horse and the rulebook, not the track surface. A bumper is programmed on a jumps card, run under the National Hunt section of the Rules, ridden at jumping weights by jump jockeys and contested by horses whose whole purpose is hurdling and chasing. A win in one does nothing to a horse's Flat record, because in the eyes of the form book it has not run on the Flat.
The nickname is usually explained by the riders. Bumpers were written for amateurs, and the bumping, unpolished seat of an inexperienced amateur at the end of two miles gave the race its name. In Ireland the races are still largely the amateurs' preserve. In Britain professionals ride in them freely, and the Champion Bumper at the Cheltenham Festival is taken seriously enough that the best jockeys in the weighing room want the ride.
There is one odd cousin. When frost wipes out a spell of turf jumping, the BHA has from time to time arranged cards of "jumpers' bumpers" on all-weather tracks: flat races restricted to established hurdlers and chasers, put on so that jumping stables have somewhere to run. They are jump racing in every legal sense, staged on a surface no hurdle has been set on for thirty years.
Horses bred for speed at two, and geldings that race into their teens
Frankel ran fourteen times between August 2010 and October 2012, won all fourteen, and was retired to stud as a four-year-old. That is what a great Flat career looks like: short, early, and ended on purpose. Desert Orchid ran seventy times across ten winters, won the King George VI Chase four times and the Cheltenham Gold Cup once, and was still racing at twelve. The public knew one of those horses for two summers and the other for most of a decade.
The Flat horse is bred to be fast and to be fast young. Every thoroughbred in the northern hemisphere has an official birthday of 1 January, and Flat horses race from the spring of the year in which they turn two. The five Classics are confined to three-year-olds. A colt good enough to win one is worth far more as a stallion than he can earn on the track, so his owners have every reason to stop while his record is intact. Fillies follow the same logic into the paddocks as broodmares.
Jumpers are a different animal with a different timetable. Most are geldings, castrated because a gelding is easier to train and to keep, and because there was never a stud career to protect. Many are bought unbroken as three-year-old "stores" and given time to grow into frames that are bigger and heavier than a sprinter's. They start in bumpers or novice hurdles at four or five, reach their best somewhere between seven and ten, and the sound ones carry on well beyond that.
- 2Flat race
- 3Hurdle race
- 4Steeplechase
Ages in years under the Rules of Racing, counted from the official 1 January birthday. Three-year-olds become eligible for hurdles part-way through the year, and the Grand National has its own higher minimum of seven.
The Grand National will not accept a runner younger than seven. Red Rum won his third at twelve, in 1977. Peter Simple was fifteen when he won it in 1853, and nobody has won it older. No Flat horse of any consequence is racing at fifteen, and few are racing at seven.
The consequence for the spectator is plain. Jump racing's stars return every winter for years, same colours and often the same jockey, and the crowd builds a relationship with them that the Flat rarely has time for. The Flat's version of continuity runs through pedigrees instead: the horse retires, and three years later its sons and daughters appear. There is an exception worth noting. Geldings on the Flat, barred from the Classics because they cannot pass anything on, are the sprinters and stayers who keep running into middle age, and they tend to be the Flat horses the public is fondest of.
Stalls and a numbered draw on the Flat, a tape and a walk-in over jumps
On 8 July 1965, at Newmarket, a field of two-year-olds was loaded into a row of steel compartments for the Chesterfield Stakes and released together when the front gates sprang open. It was the first race in Britain started from stalls. Within a few seasons they were standard on the Flat, and they have never been used over jumps.
The reason is arithmetic. In a five-furlong sprint a length lost at the start is a length that has to be found in under sixty seconds, against horses of nearly identical ability. A level break is the whole race. Stalls deliver one, and a team of handlers travels with them to load each runner, lead in the reluctant and blindfold the ones that will not go otherwise.
Stalls bring the draw with them. Each runner is allotted a stall number at random when the declarations are made, and on some tracks the number matters a great deal. Chester is the standard example: a tight, left-handed circuit only a little over a mile round, where the horse drawn in stall one sits against the inside rail and one drawn in double figures has to cover extra ground on a bend that barely stops turning. On a wide, straight course the advantage shifts with the ground and the position of the rails, and can vanish.
How a jump race gets under way
Jump races start from a tape stretched across the course, with the starter on a rostrum beside it. The field circles behind, is called forward, and approaches at a walk or a jog. When the starter is satisfied that the line is fair he drops his flag and the tape flies clear. If horses charge the tape or the line is ragged, the start is called back and the second attempt may be made from a standstill.
There is no draw. A rider chooses his own ground, inside for the shortest way round or wide for a clear sight of the first obstacle, and nobody thinks the choice decides anything. Over three miles with eighteen fences to jump, a length at the start is noise. What matters is that nobody is facing the wrong way and nobody has a flying run. The Grand National, with a huge field and a history of chaotic starts, is the one race where the procedure has been rewritten repeatedly.
The Flat does keep a flag in reserve. When stalls cannot be used, because the ground will not bear the weight of the unit or a mechanical fault has put it out of action, the Rules allow a flag start, and racecards carry a note saying so.
A minute against six: what distance does to speed and tactics
Epsom's five-furlong course runs downhill for most of its length and is the fastest in the world. The electronically timed record there was set by Stone of Folca in 2012 at 53.69 seconds, which is an average of nearly forty-two miles an hour from a standing start. A typical five-furlong race on a level track takes closer to a minute.
At the other end, the fastest Grand National on record is Mr Frisk's in 1990, on fast ground, in 8 minutes 47.8 seconds. An ordinary three-mile chase on winter ground takes six and a half minutes or so, at an average in the high twenties of miles an hour. So Flat racing is faster, and the gap is not close. The cause is cumulative: a jumper carries roughly two stone more, travels five or six times as far as a sprinter, loses momentum at every obstacle and is very often doing it on soft ground.
Speed changes what the jockeys are doing. A sprint is run close to flat out from the gates, and the riding is about position, balance and timing one effort. At a mile and a half there is a real tactical phase: a pace is set, held up or stolen, and races are lost by riders who sit too far back off a slow gallop. Over jumps the pace through the first two miles is often called hunting round, a steady rhythm in which the main business is meeting each obstacle on a good stride and keeping something in hand.
Then the differences show at the finish. Flat racing has a vocabulary for small margins, the nose, the short head, the head and the neck, and needs all of it. A Group race won by more than four or five lengths is remembered for decades: Shergar's ten-length Derby in 1981 is still the widest margin in that race's history. Over three miles in the mud, tired horses finish strung out across the width of a county, and margins of twenty or thirty lengths between the first three raise no eyebrows.
Ground matters to both, in opposite directions. The Flat's summer programme is mostly run on good or faster turf, and the jumping winter on soft. How the surface is measured and described is set out in our guide to the going, from firm to heavy.
Why jump jockeys carry two stone more than Flat jockeys
The lowest weight a horse can be set to carry in a Flat handicap is 8st 2lb. Over jumps it is 10st 2lb. Both figures were raised by two pounds in 2022, and both include the saddle, so the rider stepping on the scales has to be several pounds lighter than the number on the racecard.
Two stone is the difference between two kinds of athlete. Flat jockeys are small and very light, most of them well under five feet six, and the taller ones spend their careers managing their weight; Lester Piggott, at around five feet eight, rode for decades at a weight far below his natural one. Jump jockeys are commonly five feet eight to five feet ten and built like middleweights. They need to be. A jump jockey can expect to hit the ground many times a season, and the strength to hold a big, tiring horse together over the last two fences is part of the job.
The reason the scale sits higher over jumps is the horse. Jumpers are mature, heavy animals, and the weights were set for them in an era when the sport was close to the hunting field, where a horse carried a grown man in boots all day. The figures have crept up over time in both codes as the population the riders are drawn from has grown taller.
| Feature | Flat | Jump |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest handicap weight, since 2022 | 8st 2lb | 10st 2lb |
| Trainee rider's title | Apprentice | Conditional |
| Trainee's weight allowance | Claimed until a set number of winners is reached | Claimed until a set number of winners is reached |
| Jockeys' title decided on | Winners between Guineas weekend and Champions Day | Winners across the whole jumps season |
| Amateur riders | A small programme of dedicated races | A regular presence, including in the Grand National |
The BHA licenses riders for the Flat, for jumping or for both, and almost all of them pick one. A young Flat rider is an apprentice and a young jump rider a conditional; each claims a weight allowance that shrinks as the winners accumulate. The detail of minimum weights, allowances and what riders do to make them is in our piece on what jockeys weigh.
Each code crowns its own champions and counts them its own way. Sir Gordon Richards was champion Flat jockey twenty-six times. Sir Anthony McCoy was champion jump jockey in every one of the twenty seasons he rode as a full professional, from 1995-96 to 2014-15, and retired with 4,358 winners, all but ten of them over jumps. Neither record looks vulnerable.
Two seasons that overlap for most of the year
The textbook version is that the Flat runs in summer and the jumps in winter. It is a fair first approximation and it has been wrong in the detail since 1989.
The Flat turf season opens at Doncaster in early spring and closes at the same course in November. The core of the jumps season runs from October to April, with the Cheltenham Festival in March and the Grand National in April as its twin peaks, and it formally ends at Sandown Park in late April. A new jumps season starts within days.
Around those two cores, both codes carry on. Flat racing continues all winter on the all-weather tracks, a programme that began as insurance against frost and now has a championship of its own. Jumping continues through the summer at a group of smaller courses, on faster ground with lighter-framed horses. The result is that in most months of the year a fixture list contains both, and in spring and autumn the two overlap heavily, with the last big jump meetings and the first Classic trials sharing the same weekends.
That is the outline. The order of the big meetings, the dates on which each season officially turns over, the blank days and the reasons the calendar is shaped as it is are laid out in our guide to the British racing year, month by month.
One point belongs here because it explains the rest. The seasons sit where they do because of the ground. Jumping wants cut in the turf, since a horse landing over a fence on firm ground takes a jarring that soft ground absorbs. The Flat wants a sound, fast surface for horses whose asset is speed. Britain's weather supplies the first from October and the second from April, and the two codes took the halves of the year that suited them long before anyone drew up a fixture list.
Flat-only courses, jumps-only courses and the tracks that stage both
Britain has around sixty racecourses and no two are alike, a legacy of courses being laid out on whatever common, heath or riverside meadow a town had available. They sort into four groups.
| Type | Examples | What marks them out |
|---|---|---|
| Flat only | Newmarket, Epsom, Chester, York, Goodwood | Turf tracks with no obstacles; several are far from a regular oval |
| Jumps only | Cheltenham, Aintree, Kelso, Fontwell Park, Cartmel | Separate hurdle and chase courses, turf only |
| Dual purpose | Ascot, Sandown Park, Haydock Park, Newbury, Doncaster | Flat in summer and jumping in winter on adjacent tracks |
| All-weather | Lingfield Park, Kempton Park, Wolverhampton, Southwell, Newcastle, Chelmsford City | Artificial surface for Flat racing; some also keep turf for jumps |
The Flat-only courses include the strangest shapes in the sport. Epsom is a horseshoe that climbs, drops and tilts across its width. Chester is a near-circle inside the city walls. Newmarket has two separate courses on the same heath, each with a straight of a mile and more. None of them would suit a line of fences.
Jumps-only courses tend to be the country tracks, with Cheltenham and Aintree as the two great exceptions in scale. Aintree was a mixed course for most of its history and gave up Flat racing only in 1976. Some venues have gone the other way: Nottingham dropped jumping in the 1990s, and Warwick, long a mixed track, became jumps-only when it stopped racing on the Flat.
Dual-purpose courses are where the overlap between the codes is easiest to see. Ascot stages the Royal meeting in June and Grade 1 chases in winter, on tracks laid inside one another. Kempton and Lingfield combine an all-weather Flat circuit with turf for jumping, and Newcastle and Southwell do the same.
The all-weather jumping experiment
When the first all-weather meetings were run at Lingfield and Southwell in the autumn of 1989, the plan covered both codes. Hurdle races were staged on the artificial surfaces for several winters. They were given up in 1994 after a run of fatal injuries that the sport could not defend: the surface did not give under a falling horse in the way turf does. Since then every jump race over obstacles in Britain has been run on grass, and the all-weather has been Flat territory.
What each code is racing for: stallion value against the sport itself
Prize money is paid in both codes, and in neither does it cover the cost of the average horse. The difference lies in what a win can be turned into afterwards.
On the Flat, the answer is a stud career. The Pattern, the structure of Group races that runs from the spring trials through the five Classics to the championship races of autumn, exists to identify the best horses of each generation at each distance, and the breeding industry uses its results as a catalogue. A colt who wins the 2,000 Guineas or the Derby becomes a stallion whose earnings over the following decade can dwarf anything he won on the track. A filly who wins the Oaks becomes a broodmare whose foals sell on her name. Royal Ascot, five days in June with more Group 1 races than any other British meeting, is the shop window, and the yearling sales in the autumn are where the money changes hands.
So a great deal of Flat racing is, in economic terms, the testing arm of a bloodstock business. That is not a criticism. It is the reason the Flat can sustain the cost of its best horses, and the reason those horses disappear so quickly.
Jump racing has no such engine. Most of its runners are geldings with no breeding value at all, and the mares who do go on to breed are a minority. An owner who buys a store horse, waits two years for it to see a racecourse and another two for it to jump a fence in public is not making an investment in any sense an accountant would recognise. The return is the Saturday afternoon, and for a lucky few the four days of the Cheltenham Festival or a runner in the Grand National.
There is a neat circularity in the bloodlines. The stallions who sire jumpers are themselves retired Flat horses, typically those who stayed well and were not quite fashionable enough for the commercial Flat market. Kayf Tara won the Ascot Gold Cup twice and became one of the most successful jumps sires in Britain. Yeats won the same race four years running and followed him into the same line of work. The Flat makes the jumper, a generation later.
Crossing between Flat and jumps: horses, trainers and riders
Nothing in the Rules stops a horse doing both. The traffic is mostly one way, from the Flat to hurdles, and it is heavy.
A Flat horse with stamina and a limited rating has an obvious second career. It is fit, it knows what a racecourse is and it can be schooled over hurdles in a few weeks. Three-year-olds off the Flat make up the juvenile hurdle division each winter, and some are far better at the new job than they were at the old one. Going back the other way is less common but far from rare: an established hurdler dropped into a long-distance Flat handicap in the summer often turns out to be leniently treated, because its Flat rating was earned years earlier as an immature horse.
The documented doubles at the two great meetings are worth setting out. Brown Jack won the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham in 1928, was switched to the Flat, and won the Queen Alexandra Stakes at Royal Ascot six years in succession from 1929 to 1934; Ascot named a race after him. Junior won the Ascot Stakes at the Royal meeting in 2010 and a handicap chase at the Cheltenham Festival the following March. Vauban won the Triumph Hurdle at the 2022 Festival and the Copper Horse Stakes at Royal Ascot in 2023. Sea Pigeon belongs beside them for a different pairing: Champion Hurdles in 1980 and 1981, Chester Cups in 1977 and 1978 and the 1979 Ebor under ten stone make him the best dual-purpose horse of the modern era by most reckonings.
Trainers and jockeys who did both
Trainers hold a licence for one code or a combined licence for both, and the combined licence is common. The most complete example is Vincent O'Brien, who trained three consecutive Grand National winners in the 1950s along with four Cheltenham Gold Cups and three Champion Hurdles, then turned to the Flat and trained six Derby winners. Aidan O'Brien, no relation, trained Istabraq to win three Champion Hurdles before the Flat absorbed his whole operation. Among current jumps trainers, taking a staying hurdler to Royal Ascot for one of the long handicaps has become a habit.
Riders cross far less often, because the weights forbid it in one direction and habit discourages it in the other. A Flat jockey who grows too heavy can go jumping. A jump jockey light enough to ride on the Flat is unusual, and the two best modern cases both made the move in mid-career: Jim Crowley rode over jumps for years before switching and becoming champion Flat jockey in 2016, and Graham Lee won the Grand National on Amberleigh House in 2004 and the Ascot Gold Cup on Trip To Paris in 2015. Piggott himself rode winners over hurdles as a young man, when a Flat jockey wintering over jumps was an ordinary thing to do.
Risk and welfare: why obstacles change the figures
A horse galloping on level ground can still fall. It can clip the heels of the horse in front, slip on a bend or break down, and on the Flat these things happen at higher speeds than anything reached over jumps. They are rare, though, because there is nothing in the way. Put an obstacle in front of a tired horse eighteen times in six minutes and the number of ways a race can go wrong multiplies.
The published record reflects that. The BHA records every fatal injury on a British racecourse and publishes the rate each year as a proportion of runners, for racing as a whole and for each code. Throughout that series the rate over jumps has been higher than on the Flat, and steeplechasing has generally come out higher than hurdling. The long-term trend in the overall figure has been downward. This page does not quote a single season's numbers, because they move from year to year and a single year in isolation misleads.
What has been done about it differs by code, because the hazards differ. Over jumps the work has concentrated on the obstacles: padded hurdle designs to replace bare timber, changes to the colour of take-off boards and guard rails so that horses can see them properly, the levelling of landing areas and the reduction of field sizes in the biggest races. Individual fences with a poor record are reviewed, moved or rebuilt. On the Flat the attention falls on the starting stalls, which are padded and where an unruly horse can injure itself or a handler, on the watering and maintenance of fast summer ground, and on all-weather surfaces.
Some measures are common to both. Every runner is examined by a vet if there is any doubt about its soundness, and the vet can withdraw it at the start. Riders in both codes wear a helmet and a body protector meeting set standards, and a jockey who has a fall must pass a concussion check before riding again. Since 2019 an independently chaired Horse Welfare Board has overseen a single welfare strategy for the whole sport, published in 2020 under the title A Life Well Lived.
A fair judgement is that jump racing carries a higher risk to horse and rider than the Flat and always will, because that risk is built into what it is. Whether the level is acceptable is a real argument, conducted in public, and the sport's answer has been to measure the risk openly and reduce it obstacle by obstacle.
Where the split came from: Newmarket, two steeples and the National Hunt Committee
Flat racing was organised first. Racing on Newmarket Heath had royal patronage under the Stuarts, and around 1750 a group of owners formed the Jockey Club, which made its home there and gradually became the authority whose rules every other Flat course adopted. By the early nineteenth century the five Classics were in place and the General Stud Book was recording the pedigree of every thoroughbred.
Jumping came from the hunting field and stayed outside that structure for a long time. Its founding story is a match in 1752 in County Cork, when two men named O'Callaghan and Blake raced each other across about four and a half miles of country from the church at Buttevant to the church at Doneraile, steering by the steeple. Races across natural country between landmarks became a fashion, then a fixture, and by the 1830s meetings were being held over made courses. The Grand National was first run at Aintree in 1839.
- About 1750The Jockey Club forms and settles at Newmarket, becoming the authority for Flat racing.
- 1752Two riders race between the churches of Buttevant and Doneraile in County Cork, the match that gave the steeplechase its name.
- 1839The Grand National is run at Aintree, with jumping still outside any national authority.
- 1866The National Hunt Committee is established to regulate steeplechasing and hurdling.
- Late 1960sThe National Hunt Committee merges into the Jockey Club, putting both codes under one body.
- 2007The British Horseracing Authority is created and takes over the governance and regulation of both.
The main steps in how Flat racing and jumping came to be governed together in Britain. Dates are those generally given; the Jockey Club's founding is traditionally put at about 1750.
Early steeplechasing had a poor reputation. With no governing body, races were fixed, courses were dangerous and results were disputed. The Jockey Club declined to take responsibility for it, and in 1866 a separate National Hunt Committee was set up to do so. That committee is why the code is called what it is. It wrote the rules, licensed the riders and ran jumping as a distinct sport for about a hundred years.
The two bodies merged at the end of the 1960s, and from then on one set of stewards governed everything. The Jockey Club's regulatory role passed in stages to other bodies, ending with the creation of the British Horseracing Authority in 2007. The Jockey Club itself survives as the owner of fifteen racecourses, Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Newmarket among them, which means that the body that once refused to have anything to do with jumping now owns the two courses most associated with it.
Three centuries on, the division is a matter of programme and culture more than law. One rulebook, one regulator, one fixture list, and two sets of people who mostly prefer their own half. More racing guides are collected on our England hub, with wider coverage on the blog.