Hurdles vs Fences in Horse Racing: How the Jumps Differ

On Boxing Day at Kempton Park the Christmas Hurdle field reaches the last flight at around thirty miles an hour and goes through the top of it. There is a clatter of timber, a panel or two is knocked back on its legs, and nobody breaks stride. On the same card the King George VI Chase field meets the last fence on the same straight. It is a foot higher and as deep as a garden hedge, and it does not move for anybody.

That is the difference in a sentence. Hurdles are the smaller obstacles, at least three feet six inches high under the British Horseracing Authority's requirements, built as separate panels that lean or flatten when struck. A plain fence is at least four feet six inches high, rigid and much wider from front to back. A race over hurdles is a hurdle race. A race over fences is a steeplechase, which everyone in the sport shortens to chase, and the two ask for different horses, different techniques and often different jockeys' nerves.

Hurdles vs fences side by side: heights, build and names

Racing people count the two obstacles in different words. Hurdles come in flights, fences are simply fences, and a racecard will say "eight flights" for a two-mile hurdle and "twelve fences" for a two-mile chase. The table sets out what stands behind the vocabulary.

Feature	Hurdle	Fence
Minimum height	3ft 6in, bottom bar to top bar	4ft 6in for a plain fence
Construction	Brush panels on a timber frame, or a padded equivalent	Birch, or artificial birch, packed upright in a frame
When a horse hits it	The panel leans back or flattens	The fence stays where it is
Position on the course	Portable, re-sited through the season	Permanent at nearly every course
Name of the race	Hurdle race	Steeplechase, or chase
Fewest in a two-mile race	8	12
Types	One	Plain fence, open ditch, water jump

The hurdle's height needs a word of explanation. Three feet six inches is the measurement of the panel itself, from the bottom bar to the top. The panel is then driven into the ground leaning away from the direction of travel, so the top bar ends up a few inches lower than the nominal figure, nearer three feet above the turf than three and a half. A fence has no such discount. Its four feet six is vertical, and many are built a couple of inches over.

• 42inHurdle, minimum
• 54inPlain fence, minimum
• 62inThe Chair, Aintree

Heights in inches. The hurdle figure is the length of the panel before it is set at an angle. The Chair at Aintree is included as the tallest fence on the Grand National course, at its published height.

Twelve inches does not sound like much. The real gap lies in what happens on contact. A hurdler who gets in too close and hits the top bar loses a little momentum and carries on. A chaser who does the same thing at a fence either lands steeply, sprawls or goes down. Where jump racing sits against the level code as a whole, in its horses, weights and seasons, is the subject of our companion page on how the Flat and the jumps differ.

How a hurdle is built, and why it can be picked up and moved

The racing hurdle is a descendant of the farm hurdle, and for most of its history it looked like one: a timber frame about the width of a gate, with two pointed legs, its bars interwoven with cut birch or gorse. Groundstaff drive the legs into the turf with a mallet so that the panel leans at a set angle. Several panels in a row across the track make a flight, flanked at each end by white wings that funnel the runners in.

Everything about the design is meant to forgive. Because the panel leans away, a horse that hits it pushes it further over instead of meeting a vertical wall. Because the panels are separate, one can be flattened without disturbing the next. After a field has gone through, the groundstaff walk the flight and knock the panels back up before the next circuit, which is why there are always two or three figures in high-visibility jackets standing beside every flight.

Padded hurdles and fixed brush

The weakness of the traditional pattern is the timber. A horse's legs can go between the bars, and the top bar, even wrapped in foam, is a hard edge. The padded hurdle was developed to remove both hazards: a solid panel covered in dense foam, the same height and set at the same lean, with no gaps to catch a foot. After trials at a number of courses and a study of faller rates, the BHA announced that the padded design would become standard across British jumps tracks, phased in over several seasons.

A third pattern exists, and it blurs the line this page is about. Fixed brush hurdles, close to the pattern jumped in France, are small versions of a fence: a low frame filled with artificial brush that a horse can swish through, standing upright and fixed in place. Haydock Park was for years the British course most associated with them. They are jumped more like fences than like timber flights, they are thought to suit horses who will go chasing, and results over them are sometimes treated with a little suspicion as a guide to form elsewhere.

What portability buys

Timber and padded hurdles are carried out in a trailer and can be carried back. A clerk of the course uses that freedom all winter, shifting the line of the hurdle track a few yards at a time so that each meeting is run on fresh ground. At a dual-purpose course it also means the hurdles disappear completely in spring and the same strip of turf becomes part of the Flat track.

How a steeplechase fence is built: birch, apron and take-off board

A fence starts with a heavy timber frame fixed into the ground. Bundles of birch are packed upright into the frame, as tightly as they will go, then trimmed level across the top to the required height. From the front the face of the birch is hidden by an apron: a sloping bank of spruce, gorse or a synthetic substitute that leans against the take-off side and rises to about half the fence's height. At the foot of the apron lies the take-off board, a painted plank that gives the horse a ground line from which to judge its stride.

The result is an obstacle several feet thick at the base. It can be brushed through at the very top, where the birch is thinnest, and a good chaser will take a few inches out of it at racing pace. Below that it is solid. Some courses now use artificial birch, plastic strands made to the same stiffness, because natural birch has become harder to source and breaks down faster. The fences are rebuilt and topped up through the season as the birch settles.

The BHA's requirements recognise three kinds.

The plain fence is the standard obstacle: at least four feet six inches high, with an apron and a take-off board, and nothing else.

The open ditch is a plain fence with a ditch dug on the take-off side, its edge marked by a low guard rail or a board. The ditch pushes the take-off point back, so the horse has to stand off and jump wide as well as high. Open ditches produce the big, spectacular leaps and a fair share of the errors. Each mile of a steeplechase must include at least one.

The water jump reverses the idea. The fence is low, around three feet or under, and on the landing side there is a stretch of shallow water that the horse has to clear. It is a test of extension more than height, it is the easiest obstacle on most courses to jump, and it is no longer compulsory. Several courses have filled theirs in. Those that keep one usually put it in front of the stands, where it photographs well.

Because fences are fixed, each course's set has a character that regulars learn. Sandown Park's back straight has the three Railway Fences, plain fences set so close together that a horse who meets the first one wrong has no room to recover before the second, and the way a chaser handles them is a fair guide to how it will finish; the layout is described in our Sandown Park course guide. Cheltenham's fences are met on undulating ground. Aintree's are a law unto themselves.

How many hurdles or fences a race must have

The Rules do not leave the number of obstacles to the racecourse. A minimum is laid down for a race of a given distance, and it is noticeably stiffer for chases.

For a steeplechase there must be at least twelve fences in the first two miles and at least six more in each mile after that. For a hurdle race there must be at least eight flights in the first two miles, and one more for every complete quarter of a mile beyond.

Requirement	Hurdle race	Steeplechase
Obstacles in the first two miles	At least 8	At least 12
Beyond two miles	One more for each complete quarter mile	Six more for each further mile
Minimum for a three-mile race	12	18
Open ditches	None	At least one for each mile
Water jump	None	Optional

• Hurdle race
• Steeplechase

Two miles812

Three miles1218

Minimums from the BHA's long-standing requirements for jump courses. Courses often provide more, and an obstacle omitted on the day for safety reasons reduces the number actually jumped.

Show the numbers

Fewest obstacles a race can contain, by distance

Item	Hurdle race	Steeplechase
Two miles	8	12
Three miles	12	18

The effect is that a chaser jumps half as many obstacles again as a hurdler over the same ground. In a two-mile hurdle the flights come up roughly every quarter of a mile, with long stretches of galloping in between, which is why two-mile hurdlers are so often ex-Flat horses. In a two-mile chase there is a fence about every three hundred yards and little chance to settle.

How many are actually met in a given race is a product of geometry. The fences stand where they stand, the circuit is whatever length the site allowed, and each distance has its own starting point somewhere on it. A two-mile chase at one course may begin halfway down the back straight and take in thirteen fences; at another the same trip starts in front of the stands and includes exactly twelve. Clerks choose start positions partly to make the arithmetic work.

The championship races sit a little above the minimums. The Champion Hurdle is run over eight flights at about two miles and half a furlong, the Stayers' Hurdle over twelve at three miles, the Cheltenham Gold Cup over twenty-two fences at about three and a quarter miles. The Grand National has thirty over four and a quarter. Those totals are what the course layouts produce when everything is jumped; on a day when the sun or an incident takes an obstacle out, the race is still valid.

One caution on the precise wording. The requirement has been restated in different documents over the years, moving from the Rules themselves into the BHA's instructions to racecourses, and the half-mile cases are less tidy than the round ones. The figures in the table are the ones that have not changed.

Skimming a hurdle, measuring a fence: two ways of jumping

Watch a top two-mile hurdler in slow motion and it hardly seems to jump. The stride lengthens a fraction, the forelegs fold, the body stays almost level and the horse is away on the far side without any visible loss of speed. Good hurdlers jump low and flat, taking the top few inches of the panel with them if necessary. The skill is to do it at racing pace and to gain ground in the air on rivals who jump higher than they need to.

A fence will not allow that. A chaser has to see the obstacle, adjust its stride on the approach so that it takes off from the right spot, lift its shoulders, round its back over the top and land balanced enough to gallop away. Jockeys talk about a horse "measuring" its fences, and about one that "backs off", shortening of its own accord when it arrives on a bad stride. Those are the safe ones. The dangerous chaser is the horse that has learned over hurdles that obstacles can be run through.

That is why form over one does not transfer reliably to the other.

Big Buck's is the clearest modern case. Sent chasing as a young horse, he jumped fences adequately but without conviction, and unseated his rider at the last fence of Newbury's big staying handicap chase in November 2008 when still in contention. His trainer put him back over hurdles. He won his next eighteen races, among them four consecutive runnings of the staying hurdlers' championship at the Cheltenham Festival from 2009 to 2012. Istabraq, who won three Champion Hurdles, was never asked to jump a fence in public at all.

The reverse case is more common and less famous. A big, long-striding horse without the pace for a strongly run two-mile hurdle can look ordinary for two seasons. Put over fences, where the race is slowed by the jumping and every accurate leap gains a length, the same horse can improve by a stone. Trainers say such a horse was "always going to be a chaser", and hurdling was the schooling it needed on the way. Desert Orchid, Kauto Star and Arkle all won over hurdles first; none is remembered for it.

A few have been top class at both. Night Nurse won the Champion Hurdle in 1976 and 1977 and four years later was second in the Gold Cup, the closest any champion hurdler had come to the double until it was finally done.

From bumper to novice chase: the usual ladder

Most jumpers bred for the job follow the same route, and the route explains a good deal of racecard language.

1. 1National Hunt Flat raceA race with no obstacles, usually about two miles, for young horses that have not run on the Flat. One or two runs teach the horse what a racecourse is.
2. 2Novice hurdlesRaces for horses that had not won over hurdles before the season began. This is where the horse learns to jump at speed in a field.
3. 3Open hurdlesHandicaps or graded races against experienced hurdlers, for a season or for a career if the horse is best at it.
4. 4Novice chasesRaces for horses that had not won over fences before the season began. Most start at five, six or seven with hurdling experience behind them.
5. 5Open chasesHandicap and graded chases against all comers, the stage at which a horse is tried for the big staying or two-mile prizes.

A typical progression for a horse bred for jump racing in Britain. Horses arriving from the Flat or from point-to-points join part-way along, and not every horse takes every step.

What "novice" means

A novice is defined by the type of obstacle, not by the horse's age or experience. A novice hurdler is a horse that had not won a hurdle race before the start of the current season. A novice chaser is one that had not won a steeplechase before the start of the current season. So an eight-year-old with twenty hurdle runs behind it is a novice the first winter it goes over fences, and a horse that wins a novice hurdle in October remains a novice until the season ends in April.

There is an adjustment for late winners. A horse that breaks its duck near the end of a season would otherwise lose novice status within weeks, so the conditions allow it to keep running in novice company for a period into the following season. The cut-off dates have been altered more than once and are set out in the race conditions each year.

Juveniles and minimum ages

Not every hurdler comes up the ladder from a bumper. Each summer and autumn a wave of three-year-olds arrives from the Flat, horses with enough stamina to stay two miles and not enough class to be worth keeping to the level. They run in juvenile hurdles, restricted to their age group, turn four on 1 January and aim at the Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival. Having raced already, they tend to be quicker and sharper than the home-bred novices, and less robust.

The age limits rise with the obstacle. A horse can run over hurdles from the summer of its three-year-old year, and has to be four before it runs in a steeplechase. Bumpers carry an upper age limit, since they are meant for horses at the start of a career, and there are junior versions for three-year-olds late in the year. France does it differently and sends three-year-olds over fences, which is one reason French-bred recruits arrive in British yards with more jumping experience than their age suggests.

Separate ratings, separate tracks and separate going

A horse that has run over both carries two handicap marks, and they are maintained independently. Win a novice chase by ten lengths and the chase rating goes up. The hurdle rating stays where it was when the horse last ran over hurdles, possibly two years earlier.

When a hurdler first goes chasing, the handicapper has only its hurdle form to go on and typically starts the chase mark at or near the same figure. From there the two drift apart. Trainers watch the gap closely, because a horse that has improved over fences may be sitting on a hurdle mark that no longer reflects its ability, and a quick return to hurdles for a valuable handicap is an old and legitimate manoeuvre. How the ratings turn into weights is covered in our explainer on the handicap system.

The courses are separate as well. A jumps track is two tracks laid side by side, a chase course carrying the fixed fences and a hurdle course, inside it at some venues and outside it at others, on which the flights are set. They share bends in some places and not in others, and the hurdle course's running line moves as the season goes on. At Cheltenham there are two full sets, the Old Course and the New Course, each with its own chase and hurdle tracks.

Since the two strips of turf take different amounts of traffic and sometimes drain differently, they can ride differently on the same afternoon. Clerks of the course publish a going description for each, and it is common in winter to see something like good to soft on the chase course and soft on the hurdle course, with separate readings from the measuring stick. The scale itself, and how the stick works, is explained in our guide to how the going is described and measured. A trainer with a horse that wants better ground will sometimes pick the code on the day by the two descriptions.

When a hurdle or fence is left out of a race

Low winter sun is the commonest reason. On a clear January afternoon at a course whose home straight faces south-west, horses and riders approaching the last two obstacles are looking straight into the light and cannot judge them. The stewards, on the advice of the clerk and the senior jockeys, order those obstacles omitted, and the race is run with a long uninterrupted gallop to the line where the last two fences would have been. The decision is announced before the runners leave the paddock, the affected obstacles are marked off, and the result stands on whatever is left. On a bright afternoon late in the card a three-mile chase can lose a third of its fences this way, which changes the kind of horse the race suits.

The other reason arises mid-race. A horse or rider is down on the landing side of an obstacle and being treated, the field is due to come round again, and there is no possibility of clearing the area in time. The obstacle is bypassed.

1. 1IncidentA horse or jockey is being treated on the landing side, or the obstacle itself is damaged, with the field due to return.
2. 2DecisionOfficials at the obstacle signal that it must not be jumped on the next circuit.
3. 3MarkingDirection markers and cones are set across the take-off side to steer the runners to one side of the wings.
4. 4WarningA chequered flag is waved on the approach so that riders know the obstacle ahead is out.
5. 5BypassThe field goes round on the marked side and rejoins the course beyond the obstacle. Jumping it instead is a breach of the Rules.

The general sequence used on British jump courses when an obstacle cannot safely be jumped on a later circuit. Details of equipment vary by course.

The system is relatively recent in its present form. For most of the sport's history a casualty behind a fence was screened and the field jumped the fence regardless, steering to one side. The 2011 Grand National was the first running in which fences were bypassed, two of them on the second circuit.

Missing an obstacle by accident

The Rules are blunt about the obstacles that are in play. A horse must jump every one of them, in order, on the correct course. If it runs out, going round the wing instead of over the obstacle, or refuses, the rider may turn back and put it at the obstacle again; if he carries on without doing so, the horse is disqualified. A rider who takes the wrong course and continues can expect a suspension as well.

Two further points. A rider who is unseated may not remount and continue, a change made in 2009 to protect horses that might have been injured in the fall. And the bypass rule cuts both ways: a rider who jumps an obstacle that has been marked out of the race has broken the Rules as surely as one who misses an obstacle that was in, and the stewards hold an enquiry.

Why fences bring more falls, and what has been redesigned

Falls are more frequent in steeplechases than in hurdle races. That has been true in every set of figures the BHA has published, and the mechanism is obvious enough: more obstacles to the mile, each of them unyielding, jumped by horses that are tiring over longer distances.

Hurdle falls are fewer but they are not gentle. Hurdlers travel faster, and a horse that gets a flight wrong at two-mile pace turns over quickly. It was the nature of those falls, with legs caught in timber, that drove the development of the padded hurdle described above.

The most visible recent change concerns colour. For generations the take-off boards, guard rails and hurdle top bars on British courses were painted orange, on the assumption that a bright colour made the obstacle stand out. Research commissioned by the BHA and the RSPCA from the University of Exeter tested that assumption against what is known of equine vision. Horses see with two types of colour receptor, not three, and to them orange is close to the green of the turf and the brown of the birch. White, and certain fluorescent yellows, stood out far more strongly, and horses in trials adjusted their jumping when the colour was changed. From 2022 the orange markers on British jumps courses were replaced with white. It is a rare example of a welfare measure that cost little, altered the look of the sport overnight and drew almost no objection.

Fence-by-fence review goes on all the time. Every faller is logged against the obstacle where it happened, and a fence with a persistently poor record is examined: its position relative to a bend or a downhill run, the camber of its approach, the level of its landing side. Cheltenham moved the second-last fence on its Old Course off a downhill stretch and into the home straight after years of falls there. Aintree has levelled landings, softened the cores of its fences and brought the first fence closer to the start to reduce the speed at which it is met.

There is an honest limit to this. An obstacle that could not bring a horse down would not be a fence, and the sport's position is that the risk can be reduced a long way but not removed.

Chases that break the pattern: cross-country, Aintree and hunters

Three kinds of steeplechase are run over obstacles that the standard birch fence does not describe.

Cross-country chases are run on a separate course laid out inside the main track, and the obstacles are borrowed from the hunting field and from the banks courses of Ireland and France: timber rails, living hedges, banks that horses jump on to and off, ditches and tight changes of direction. Cheltenham has the best-known British example, used at the Festival, and its layout and rules are set out in our piece on Cheltenham's cross-country chase. The races are slow, long and won by specialists.

The Grand National course at Aintree is the second exception. Its fences are built around a core and dressed with loose green spruce, so that they look like nothing else in racing, and several have ditches, brooks or drops on the landing side. They are used for only a handful of races a year. Besides the National itself there are the Topham and the Foxhunters' at the April meeting and two further chases in the early winter, the Becher and the Grand Sefton, and that is all. Each fence is described in running order on our page listing all sixteen National fences.

Hunters' chases are ordinary steeplechases over regulation fences with an unusual entry condition: the horses must have qualified through the hunting field or point-to-points, and the riders are amateurs. The two that matter most are the Foxhunters' at Cheltenham, run on Gold Cup day over the same course and distance, and the Foxhunters' at Aintree over the National fences. Behind them sits the whole point-to-point circuit, amateur steeplechasing organised by the hunts on temporary courses in farmland, over birch fences a little smaller than those on a licensed track. Every point-to-point race over obstacles is a chase. There is no such thing as a point-to-point hurdle race, which says something about where each obstacle came from.

The championship ladders, and Dawn Run's double

Because hurdling and chasing are separate disciplines, and because two miles and three miles ask different questions, the top of the sport is organised into four divisions. Each has a mid-winter test and a championship at the Cheltenham Festival in March.

Division	Mid-winter test	Festival championship	Approximate trip
Two-mile hurdlers	Christmas Hurdle, Kempton Park	Champion Hurdle	2m ½f
Staying hurdlers	Long Walk Hurdle, Ascot	Stayers' Hurdle	3m
Two-mile chasers	Tingle Creek Chase, Sandown Park	Queen Mother Champion Chase	2m
Staying chasers	King George VI Chase, Kempton Park	Cheltenham Gold Cup	3m 2½f

A horse's campaign is a path through one of those rows. A two-mile hurdler might begin in the Fighting Fifth Hurdle at Newcastle around the end of November, go to Kempton at Christmas and arrive at Cheltenham with two runs behind it. A staying chaser has fewer and harder options, and many run only three or four times in a winter. A fifth division has grown up between the rows since 2005, when the Festival added a championship chase over about two and a half miles for horses too slow for the Champion Chase and not certain to stay the Gold Cup trip. Purists objected that it diluted both, and it has filled every year since. Our pages on the Champion Hurdle and the Gold Cup take those two championships in detail.

The table also shows why moving between rows is hard. To win the Champion Hurdle a horse needs the speed to travel at two-mile pace and jump flat. To win the Gold Cup it needs to stay three and a quarter miles and jump twenty-two fences accurately on a course that is never level. The qualities overlap very little.

One horse has done both. Dawn Run, a mare trained in Ireland by Paddy Mullins, won the Champion Hurdle in 1984, a year in which she also won the Irish and French versions of the race. She went chasing, missed most of a season through injury, and arrived at the 1986 Gold Cup having run in only a handful of steeplechases. Headed at the last fence and seemingly beaten, she rallied up the hill under Jonjo O'Neill to win. Forty years on, nobody has matched her, and the list of champion hurdlers who never ran over a fence, or ran over one and were quietly returned to hurdles, is long.

Where the words hurdle and steeplechase come from

Both names are older than the obstacles they now describe.

A hurdle, to a farmer, is a movable panel of woven hazel or split timber used to pen sheep. It is light, it stands on two legs pushed into the ground and it can be carried under one arm. When racing over artificial obstacles on a flat course became a fashion in the early nineteenth century, sheep hurdles were what was to hand. The first hurdle race is usually said to have been run on Durdham Down, near Bristol, in 1821, though as with most racing firsts the claim rests on tradition more than record.

The steeplechase has a firmer origin story. In 1752 two County Cork gentlemen, O'Callaghan and Blake, settled an argument about their hunters by racing from Buttevant church to the church at Doneraile, between four and five miles off. A steeple was the one landmark visible across enclosed country, so a race from one to another had an unmistakable start and finish and no set route between. Whatever lay in the way, walls, banks or streams, was the course. Within two generations the idea had moved on to marked courses with built fences, and the steeples had gone, leaving only the word.

Athletics took both. Students at Exeter College, Oxford, are credited with running the first foot steeplechase in 1850, a cross-country race modelled on the horse version, and the track event that grew from it still has barriers and a water jump: twenty-eight barriers and seven water jumps in the modern 3,000 metres. The sprint hurdles borrowed the farm panel and, more surprisingly, kept its size. The men's high hurdle stands at 1.067 metres, which is three feet six inches, the same minimum the BHA applies to a hurdle on a racecourse. The human versions are set out on our page about hurdle heights in athletics, and there is more track and field coverage in the athletics section.

So a sheep pen and a pair of Irish churches supplied the names for two obstacles, two kinds of race and two Olympic events. More guides to racing in this country are gathered on the England hub.