Are Lower Grand National Fences Safer?

Fallers and the Aintree Grand National

There’s always a lot of discussion around the Grand National about horse welfare. To tackle one of these issues, they made amendments to lower the fences to help tackle fallers. The interesting thing about this is that the jockeys were actually disputing the new lower fences, saying, “If you lower the fences, then the horses will just go at them more, and there’ll be more fallers.”

This made me think, “Let’s actually go out and see what the impact of all the different characteristics of jumps is, how that affects the number of fallers in horse racing, and whether it’s safe or not.”

Let’s do the science! Myth or not?

Myth one: Does having more runners cause more fallers?

Firstly, I wanted to explore if congestion on the racecourse increases the number of fallers. Would the number of runners directly correlate to the number of fallers, yes or no?

Now, the answer is yes. The number of runners does correlate to the number of fallers, but not in a way that you would expect. When I looked at field sizes, I looked at the average size of the field. Now, in comparison to normal races, which have around 10 runners, the Grand National is unique in having a total of 40 runners.

To begin with, I looked at races with runners between 3 and 17 to see what impact the field size had on the number of fallers. The curious thing is that the smaller the field, the more fallers there are as a percentage of the total field.

The Numbers…

It’s quite a small percentage, but that percentage is there. So you can hypothesise that maybe when horses are in smaller fields, they tend to be going for it a bit more, etc, but there seems to be a variable that is causing this trend. In more significant fields, you tend to find that the jockeys are taking a little bit more care and are perhaps trying to avoid accidents because there are so many runners.

So what do you think? Confirmed, busted or plausible?

Myth two: Do longer distances tire horses, resulting in more fallers?

Secondly, I looked over distance to see if horses getting tired may be a potential issue within a particular race.

Would you say that tired horses tend to jump worse or not? The answer is that generally, the longer a race is, the slightly more fallers you get.

The Numbers…

However, it’s a tiny percentage and not an exponential graph. When looking at the minimum trip of two miles, generally, the number of fallers is about 2%. Then, when it rises to much longer distances, like 21 furlongs, you tend to find that it starts to level off.

It tends to plateau at that point if you’re looking between two and three miles. Yes, it does increase, but it’s very slight and tends to level off fairly quickly in the overall scheme of things.

So what do you think? Confirmed, busted or plausible?

Myth three: Does the going effect the chance of fallers?

Now, the next factor I considered is the going because the going should give me some information as to how things are likely to go. The interesting thing about this is that once again, the difference between different types of going is indeed slight, but it does give you a clue as to what’s going on with the horse in this particular race.

So which do you think it is? Do you believe that the ground at different racecourses produces more fallers?

Well, the answer is that firm ground produces more fallers, and the data shows that this is reasonably well correlated.

Interestingly, the number of fallers starts to decline when you get into the soft and heavy ground. On the heavier ground, the horses will be running slower, but they seem to jump more cleanly if they’re running slower. This is pretty much what the jockeys said when they said don’t lower the fences at the Grand National because the horses will run at them faster.

If you have a tall fence and heavy ground, the horses tend to run slower and time their jumps just a bit better.

Now, if the ground is firm and the horses are running at them quite quickly, then that tends to be when there are more falls. It could be that a mistimed jump is creating half of that issue.

So what do you think? Confirmed, busted or plausible?

Lowering fences at the Grand National, is it helpful or not?

So, I think that at the Grand National, lowering the fences was done to make them safer from the public perspective, but in reality, that probably is making them slightly more dangerous. Indeed, if you did that across all the race courses, you’d start to see more fallers.

Whereas at the moment, the status quo says that if there is heavy ground, one or two things will happen. The horse will slow down and have more time to assess the jump and jump it properly. Or perhaps if the jockey feels that the horse is unable to cope with the ground, conditions and the jumps, he will pull them up.

The stats show that the jockeys are pulling up more horses and heavy ground. They’re not making them jump; they’re not forcing them to jump. They can tell when or not the horse is responding properly and take the necessary action.

In conclusion…

So, from a PR perspective,, modifying the course has probably been a win. However, from a safety perspective, I suspect that it hasn’t been a win and that, in fact, lowering fences and making them easier to jump will probably increase the propensity for accidents.

I haven’t deliberately looked to find this outcome. I just looked at all of the stats and was totally surprised, as you probably were, that there were more fallers on firm ground as a percentage of the total field than there were on heavy ground.