Horse Racing Going Explained: Firm to Heavy and GoingStick

The going at a British racecourse is the official word for how firm or soft the racing surface is, and on turf it is one of seven: hard, firm, good to firm, good, good to soft, soft and heavy. The clerk of the course chooses it, publishes it when the race is open for entries, revises it when runners are declared and again on the morning of racing, and changes it during the afternoon if the weather moves faster than the forecast. Good is the centre of the scale. Everything else is a step either side.

All-weather tracks have their own five-step scale, from fast through standard to slow, because a synthetic surface does not soak up rain the way grass does. British courses have also been required to report a GoingStick figure beside the word since 2009: a measured number from an instrument pushed into the ground. The word is the official going. The number is supporting evidence, and it only makes sense when compared with that same course on other days. That is the short version of horse racing going explained. The long version is about how a clerk arrives at the word, why two clerks with the same rainfall can reach different ones, and why trainers argue about it from May to September.

The seven steps of British turf going, firm to heavy

A clerk of the course walking the home straight at Haydock at seven in the morning is making a judgement that will be printed in every racecard in the country. The choice is from a fixed list. The British Horseracing Authority does not allow a clerk to invent "dead" or "holding" or "sticky", however well those words might describe the ground. They have to pick one of the seven and, if the course is not uniform, qualify it.

Official description	What it means underfoot	How often it appears
Hard	Baked, almost no give at all	Practically never declared for a race
Firm	Very little give, the surface rings under a hoof	Occasional in a dry summer, rarely deliberate
Good to firm	Fast ground with a little cushion	Common on the Flat in summer
Good	Some give, a heel leaves a shallow mark	The reference point, common in both codes
Good to soft	Noticeable give, slower times	Common in spring and autumn
Soft	Hooves sink, stamina starts to tell	Regular in the jumps season
Heavy	Saturated, horses labour	Midwinter jumps meetings and wet autumns

The scale is ordinal. It ranks the ground, it does not measure it, which is why the gap between good and good to soft is not the same physical gap as the one between soft and heavy. A horse that handles good to soft may hate heavy; another may handle anything down to soft and then stop as if shot when the ground goes one step further.

• 7Turf descriptions
• 5All-weather descriptions
• 6All-weather tracks in Britain

Counts of official descriptions available to a clerk of the course. The turf scale runs hard to heavy; the all-weather scale runs fast to slow. Qualifying phrases such as "in places" are not separate steps.

Why the middle of the scale does most of the work

Most British turf racing takes place on good to firm, good or good to soft. Firm is uncommon because clerks water to avoid it, and heavy is confined to the wettest weeks of the jumps season and the odd waterlogged autumn Flat fixture. Hard sits on the scale for completeness. A course with hard ground would almost always abandon rather than race on it, because the risk of jarring and injury is too high, and the BHA's guidance on going management points clerks firmly away from producing it.

So the debate that fills racing radio in July is rarely about hard against heavy. It is about good to firm against good, a single step, and whether a clerk who has watered has watered enough. That single step can decide whether a trainer runs a horse at all.

Reading the official going: good to soft, "in places" and the words in brackets

The headline word is often followed by a second phrase. "Good to soft, good in places." "Soft, heavy in places on the hurdles course." "Good to firm, firm in places." The first description is the dominant condition. The second tells you a part of the course is a step different.

Good to soft is worth pausing on, because it is the single description most searched for and the one casual racegoers find hardest to picture. It means ground with obvious give, a heel pressed down leaves a definite print, horses run a little slower than on good, but nobody is wading. A Flat horse described as "needing some cut" usually wants good to soft or softer. A jumps horse that "goes on any ground" has been seen to win on good to soft and on good to firm without its form falling apart.

How "in places" is meant to be read

The qualifier is not decoration. A course is several hundred acres of grass across different soils, slopes and drainage. The bend nearest a river will be wetter than the ridge by the stands. A clerk declaring "good, good to soft in places" is saying the majority is good and identifiable patches are softer. It does not tell you which patches. Trainers and jockeys find that out by walking the course, and the clerk will often answer questions on where the softer ground lies.

Sometimes the qualifier is attached to one track within the course: "chase course good, hurdle course good to soft". That is not a contradiction. The two tracks are separate strips of turf, often with different usage histories, and they genuinely ride differently.

When the headline and the qualifier flip

A course drying out through the day can move from "good to soft, soft in places" to "good to soft" to "good to soft, good in places" without a drop of rain. Each change is a clerk deciding the dominant condition has shifted. The order matters: the first word is always the majority view. Two descriptions that read similar on a racecard can describe quite different courses, and the difference is entirely in which word came first.

The all-weather scale: standard, fast and slow

All-weather racing came to Britain in 1989, and its going needed a vocabulary of its own. A synthetic surface drains, so rain does not soften it the way it softens turf. What changes an artificial track is temperature, the way the surface has been harrowed and the moisture held in its top layer.

The scale has standard at the centre, with fast and slow either side, and two intermediate steps:

All-weather description	What it means
Fast	Quicker than normal for the track, the surface packed and riding tight
Standard to fast	Slightly quicker than the course's normal
Standard	The surface riding as it normally does
Standard to slow	A little slower, typically loose or cold
Slow	Noticeably slower than normal, rare in practice

"Standard" does not mean the same speed at every all-weather track. It means the surface is riding as that track normally rides. Standard at Southwell, on Tapeta since the old fibresand was replaced, will not produce the same times as standard on Kempton's Polytrack.

The six British all-weather tracks and their surfaces

The surfaces themselves are proprietary blends of sand, fibre and wax or polymer. Polytrack is used at Lingfield, Kempton and Chelmsford City. Tapeta is used at Wolverhampton, Newcastle and, since the replacement of its fibresand, Southwell. Fibresand was a deeper, more testing material and was the surface that made Southwell famous for horses that handled it and failed everywhere else.

Why does maintenance matter more than weather? A Polytrack surface left unharrowed in a cold snap compacts and can ride faster; harrowed deeply after frost it can ride loose and slow. The ground staff decide the depth of harrowing, and that decision moves the going more than a shower of rain would. When a clerk at an all-weather course changes the description mid-afternoon it is often because the temperature has dropped, not because the sky has opened.

The all-weather tracks also host the winter Flat programme, and readers comparing the two codes will find that context in our guide to the differences between Flat and jump racing.

Who decides the going, and when it is published

The clerk of the course is the official responsible. On a jumps course in winter the clerk may walk the track in the dark at six in the morning with a torch and a GoingStick, take readings, push a heel in at intervals, look at the rain gauge, read the forecast and submit the description through the BHA's racing administration system. The description then appears in the declarations published to the racing press and on racecourse websites.

1. 1EntriesThe clerk publishes a going description and any watering plans when the race closes for entries
2. 2Forecast checkThe clerk monitors rainfall and the forecast and may revise the description before declarations
3. 3DeclarationsAn updated going is issued when runners are declared, which is what trainers use to confirm or withdraw
4. 4Morning of racingThe clerk walks the course, takes GoingStick readings and issues the going for the day
5. 5During the meetingIf rain falls or the ground dries, the clerk informs the stewards and a change is announced to the public
6. 6After racingRainfall, readings and race times are recorded and compared with the declared description

The general sequence used at British courses. Exact timings depend on the race type and the entry and declaration schedule, which the BHA sets.

The changes during a meeting

The description can change between races. If heavy rain arrives after the first, the clerk can move good to soft to soft before the third. The change is passed to the stewards and announced on the public address and to the media. Jockeys returning after the first two races are a clerk's most immediate source: a senior rider reporting that it is riding soft out there carries weight, though the clerk is not bound by it.

Why clerks disagree with trainers

Every clerk faces the same pressure. Declare the ground too soft and trainers of fast-ground horses withdraw; declare it too firm and the soft-ground horses stay at home. Field size matters to a racecourse commercially, so a clerk has an incentive to describe the ground in a way that keeps runners in. The BHA monitors clerks' declared going against race times and readings, and a clerk who consistently declares ground softer or firmer than it rides will hear about it.

None of this is a conspiracy. It is what happens when a single official must put one word on several miles of living grass and the people who pay for the race care deeply about that word.

The GoingStick and the number beside the word

The GoingStick looks like a walking stick with a pointed probe and a handle containing a sensor. The operator pushes the probe vertically into the turf to a fixed depth and then levers the handle back towards themselves. The instrument records two things: the force needed to push it in, which is penetration, and the force resisting the lever, which is shear. It combines those into a single figure.

The scale runs roughly from 1 to 15, and a higher number means firmer ground. A reading of 9 at a given course is firmer than a reading of 7 at the same course. Most turf racing in Britain happens in the middle of that range. The exact numbers that correspond to "good" vary from track to track, which is the subject of the next section.

The instrument was designed by Cranfield University with the turf-measurement company TurfTrax, after trials in which its readings were compared with clerks' traditional assessments. Reporting the reading alongside the official description became a requirement for British racecourses in 2009, so a racecard can say "good to soft (GoingStick 6.8)".

1. 1Probe inThe operator pushes the stick vertically into the turf, recording penetration resistance
2. 2Lever backThe handle is pulled back to a set angle, recording the turf's resistance to shear
3. 3Single figureThe instrument combines the two measurements into one reading
4. 4Around the courseReadings are taken at regular intervals along the racing line, inside and middle
5. 5AveragedThe readings are averaged for each course or track and published beside the official description

The method is common to British courses; the number of readings and their spacing vary by track length and layout.

Taking readings around the course

One reading means very little. The clerk or a member of the ground staff walks the racing line and takes readings at regular intervals, typically on both the inside and the middle of the track. Those are averaged to give the published figure. A large spread between the firmest and softest readings is itself information: it suggests the "in places" qualifier is doing real work.

Why the clerk still decides

The GoingStick does not declare the going. The BHA's position has been that the number supports the clerk's judgement rather than replacing it. The probe only reads the top few inches; it cannot sense the deep moisture that will come up through the turf by the afternoon, nor how a layer of rain on top of firm ground will ride. That is why a clerk can publish "good" beside a reading that, at another course, would look like good to firm.

Why a GoingStick reading only compares within one course

The obvious question about the GoingStick is why one universal table does not convert numbers into words. It is because soil differs.

Newmarket's Rowley Mile sits on the chalk of the Heath. Other courses race on heavier, more water-retentive ground, and no two tracks have quite the same profile underneath the grass. A clay-based soil holds water, resists the probe in a different way when wet, and gives a different combination of penetration and shear from a free-draining chalk or sandy loam carrying the same amount of moisture. Two courses can both be genuinely good, by any horseman's description, and produce readings a point or more apart.

The course's own history is the only sensible reference. A clerk who has published readings for years knows that their good ground sits within a certain band, and that when the stick goes above a certain figure the ground has moved towards good to firm. Comparing one course's figure with another's is like comparing two thermometers that were never calibrated against each other.

How regular racegoers actually use the reading

The useful comparison is between days at the same course. A reading of 7.5 at the start of the week and 8.4 on raceday, with no rain, says the ground has dried noticeably, whatever the word in the description. A reading lower on the bend than in the straight says the inside of the bend is softer. Used that way, the figure is more precise than the word.

Some courses also publish readings for each part of the track, or for the inside and outside of the straight, and that granular data is more informative than the headline average. Not every course does it the same way, which is one more reason to compare a course with itself.

Watering in dry spells and the summer arguments

Watering is the clerk's main tool, and it is used for safety as much as for racing quality. Firm ground jars a horse's legs and feet. Repeated concussion on firm summer ground is linked to the lameness and injuries every trainer fears, and over jumps, where horses land from height, firm ground is a recognised safety concern. A clerk waters to keep the surface on the safe side of the scale.

The BHA's general instructions on going ask Flat courses to aim to provide good to firm ground, and jumps courses to aim for good and to go no firmer than good to firm. The instruction allows for a course whose soil, topography or run of consecutive fixtures makes good the sensible target on the Flat too, and the wording has been revised more than once, but the direction has been consistent: clerks are expected to prevent firm ground rather than race on it.

Why watered ground rides differently from rained-on ground

Water applied from irrigation booms or travelling sprinklers lands on the surface and soaks in from the top. Natural rainfall over days soaks deeper and more evenly. Watered ground can therefore ride with a soft top and a firm base, and trainers sometimes say it "rides quicker than the description". Clerks counter that the alternative, not watering, would be firmer still. Both are partly right, and the GoingStick does not resolve it, because it reads the same few inches either way.

Trainers on both sides

A trainer with a horse that wants fast ground wants the clerk to water lightly; a trainer with a horse that wants cut wants plenty. Every July somebody is unhappy. Some courses publish exactly how many millimetres of water have been applied and when, which lets trainers judge for themselves, and the more transparent clerks find it cuts the argument short. The summer meetings at the big Flat courses attract the strongest opinions because the prize money is high and the horses are valuable, and the same clerk who is praised in a wet June can be criticised in a dry August.

Watering also cannot be done on a whim. It takes hours to cover a full racecourse, it needs a water supply and in some places an abstraction licence, and in a long drought there may be limits on how much can be drawn.

One meeting, several goings: rails, bends and fresh ground

A single fixture can produce three or four different official descriptions. A Flat course with a straight track and a round course may declare "straight course good to firm, round course good". A jumps course with separate chase and hurdle tracks will often declare each. Cheltenham uses the Old Course and the New Course at different stages of its Festival, and each ground has its own going; the layouts are compared in our guide to the Old Course and New Course at Cheltenham.

Moving the running rail

Clerks move the running rail, the inside barrier of the track, to give horses fresh ground. Moving the rail out by a few yards puts the racing line onto grass that has not been galloped on, which is less cut up and often a fraction firmer. The cost is that the race gets longer, because horses take a wider route round each bend, and the BHA requires the extra distance to be announced. How those added yards affect a race's advertised trip is explained in our guide to the furlong and British race distances.

The strip nearest the rail cutting up

On soft ground the inside strip gets churned over the course of an afternoon. By the last race, the ground nearest the rail on a bend may be noticeably slower than the ground two horse-widths out. That is why jockeys on soft or heavy ground are sometimes seen coming wide into the straight, searching for better ground on the stands' side or the far side. Nothing in the official description captures this. It is the clerk's going plus whatever four or five earlier races have done to it.

Straight courses and the draw

On a wide straight course the ground can also differ across the track. If rain falls with the wind behind it, one side may be softer than the other. This sometimes produces a race in which runners split into two groups on opposite sides and finish in two separate clusters, the ground under them deciding the order more than ability.

What the going does to a race

The going alters the race itself. A five-furlong sprint on good to firm and the same race on soft are not quite the same test.

On firm or good to firm ground, the pace is quicker, horses travel easily, races are often run at a strong gallop and the finish is tight, with horses finishing close together. Speed and a fluent action are rewarded. On soft and heavy ground the pace is slower, horses tire more, stamina becomes decisive and finishing margins widen. A three-mile chase on heavy ground in January can end with horses finishing many lengths apart, walking over the last few fences.

Action and preference

Horses have preferences. A horse with a long, low, sweeping stride tends to be most efficient on fast ground, where its foot meets the surface and leaves it quickly. A horse with a higher, rounder, more knee-lifting action often copes better with soft ground, where it needs to pull its feet out. Trainers describe horses as wanting "top of the ground" or "needing cut", and those descriptions come from watching how a horse moves and how it has run on different goings. Some horses handle everything. Most have a range.

Going	Typical effect on the race	Type of horse it tends to suit
Good to firm	Fast pace, close finishes, quick times	Horses with a fluent, low action and plenty of speed
Good	The fairest neutral test	Most horses, which is why it is the reference point
Good to soft	Times slower, stamina a growing factor	Horses that want some give but not deep ground
Soft	Slower pace, wider margins	Strong stayers, horses with a rounder action
Heavy	Gruelling, horses finish tired and strung out	Out-and-out mudlarks and stout stayers

Late withdrawals for a change in the going

When the going changes between declaration and the race, trainers can withdraw runners. Those late withdrawals are recorded as non-runners, with "going" given as the reason. A course that receives unexpected rain overnight may lose several runners from a field. A trainer may also withdraw a horse with an explicit going preference if the ground moves away from what was expected when it was declared. This page describes how the going shapes races; it is not a guide to picking winners.

Waterlogging, frost and the morning inspection

The going has a limit beyond which racing stops. On turf that limit is usually waterlogging: standing water on the track, in the take-off or landing area of a fence, or soil so saturated that horses cannot race safely on it. Frost and snow are the other enemies. A frozen surface is hard and slippery and cannot be raced on; frost in the ground can also make the take-off and landing at a fence dangerous.

How an inspection works

When a clerk believes racing may not be possible, they call an inspection. Inspections are announced in advance, often the evening before or at a set time on the morning of racing. Stewards, the clerk and sometimes BHA officials walk the course at the announced time and decide whether racing can go ahead. If not, the meeting is abandoned. If conditions are borderline, a second inspection may be scheduled later in the morning. A meeting can also be abandoned during the afternoon, after a race, if conditions worsen.

Frost covers

Some courses use frost covers: large sheets laid over the track, especially on the take-off and landing areas of fences and hurdles, to keep frost out of the ground overnight. They are labour-intensive to lay and lift and do not cover an entire course at every venue, but at a valuable winter fixture they can save a meeting. They do nothing against snow lying on top.

Firm ground over jumps

The other end of the scale matters too. Clerks are careful not to run jumps races on firm ground, because horses landing over fences on firm ground take more concussion. Late-season jumps meetings in a dry spring are sometimes abandoned or have races restricted because the ground has dried too much and watering cannot keep up. That is an underrated reason for abandonment, and it shows the BHA's going guidance is about safety in both directions. The rhythm of wet winters and drier summers across the British calendar is covered in our guide to the shape of the British racing season.

Checking the going against the clock

There is an independent check on the clerk's word: the clock. Every British course has standard times for each distance, reflecting how fast a good horse runs over that trip on good ground. When races on the day run well slower than standard, the ground was softer than good; when they run faster, firmer. Analysts compute a "going allowance" from the average difference across a card and use it to judge whether the official going was accurate.

When the clock and the clerk disagree

Sometimes the clock says something different from the declared going. A course declared "good to soft" may produce times consistent with good, or a card declared "good" may run like good to firm. That does not necessarily mean the clerk was wrong. Times also depend on pace: a slowly run race returns a slow time on any ground. Wind matters too, especially on a straight course. A strong headwind up the home straight slows every race, and a following wind speeds them up.

Over a meeting with several races, though, the effect of pace tends to average out, and a consistent gap between the clock and the declared going is a real signal. The BHA and the racing press do look at this. A clerk whose declarations regularly diverge from the times will be questioned, which is one reason the published description has drifted closer to measured reality since the GoingStick arrived.

Sectional times as a newer cross-check

Sectional timing, now recorded at many British tracks, adds detail. Ground that is tiring horses shows up in slower closing sectionals, and fast ground often shows in a quicker overall tempo. A clerk cannot see that from the rail. The data comes after the race, so it informs the next declaration rather than the current one. Timing on the finish line itself is explained in our guide to the photo finish and how results are judged.

Yielding, penetrometers and American mud: other scales

Britain's seven steps are not universal. Ireland runs the same broad scale but uses yielding where a British clerk would write good to soft, with good to yielding and yielding to soft either side of it and soft to heavy below. Whether yielding is a straight translation of good to soft or sits a shade quicker than it is argued over on both sides of the Irish Sea; what is not in dispute is that a horse on yielding is on ground with some give, and that Irish trainers treat yielding to soft as noticeably testing.

France measures with a penetrometer, a weighted probe dropped into the ground. The reading is a number, published with a French descriptor from a scale that runs très léger and léger at the dry end, through bon à léger, bon and bon à souple, to souple, collant, lourd and très lourd. A French going report is closer to a measurement than a British one, and the penetrometer figure is quoted alongside the word; French courses have begun taking GoingStick readings as well.

American racing is run largely on dirt, which needs a different vocabulary entirely. A dirt track can be fast, wet fast, good, muddy, sloppy or slow, and is described as sealed when it has been rolled tight before rain; sloppy means water lying on the surface, muddy means water soaked through. American turf racing uses firm, good, yielding, soft and heavy, the last of them rare in North America.

Country	Typical going vocabulary	How it is assessed
Great Britain	Hard, firm, good to firm, good, good to soft, soft, heavy	Clerk's judgement, with GoingStick readings published
Ireland	Firm, good to firm, good, good to yielding, yielding, yielding to soft, soft, soft to heavy, heavy	Clerk's judgement, with GoingStick readings at many tracks
France	Très léger, léger, bon à léger, bon, bon à souple, souple, collant, lourd, très lourd	Penetrometer reading plus descriptor
United States (dirt)	Fast, wet fast, good, muddy, sloppy, slow, with sealed for a rolled track	Track superintendent's assessment

From boot heel to measured reading

Before the GoingStick, British clerks used a walking stick pushed into the turf and a boot heel. The heel test is as old as racing: press a heel in, judge how far it sinks and how the turf springs back. Experienced clerks were remarkably consistent with it. But it was personal and unrepeatable, and two clerks at neighbouring courses could disagree. The measured reading did not replace judgement; it gave judgement something to be checked against. The going description remains a word chosen by a person, and the British approach is honest about that.

Readers following the wider sport can find more on the rules and the major meetings from our England sports hub.