- Cheltenham’s new hurdles are designed with horse safety and welfare in mind
- They are deemed to be 11 per cent safer thanks to one particular addition
Cheltenham Festival’s hurdles will be significantly different this year as organisers seek to improve horse welfare.
The new obstacles will have rubber padding Velcroed on to the wood as opposed to having exposed birch in a move designed to slash the number of falls.
Cheltenham gets underway on Tuesday, March 11 and will finish with the Gold Cup on Friday, March 14.
Seventy-six horses have died at Cheltenham since 2000 but it is hoped that spending £1,000 each on the new obstacles will help protect the horses.
The padded units are deemed to be 11 per cent safer than their predecessors and have a track record of producing fewer falls.
Moreover, the move should save money in the long run.
Cheltenham Festival’s hurdles will look very different this year due to padding put on the wood
Traditionally, the hurdles have been made with exposed birch, but this leads to more falls
The new hurdles are supposedly 11 per cent safer than their old counterparts
By this stage last season, almost 100 hurdles had been smashed during races at the track. So far this campaign, that number stands at just 11 after nine days of racing.
The new design, called ‘one-fit padded hurdles,’ has already paid dividends for big-name horses.
When Constitution Hill ploughed through the last flight during the Unibet International Hurdle on January 25, he hit the panel at such force and speed it should have been destroyed and he should have fallen. Both, happily, came away unscathed.
‘Those courses that started with these hurdles in the early days, the vets that worked on those courses reported that they saw a lot less nicks and scrapes than you saw with traditional birch hurdles,’ Jon Pullin, clerk of Cheltenham Racecourse, told the BBC.
‘That’s obviously a huge benefit to the horses competing.’
