Category: Grand National

One of just five ‘named’ fences on the Grand National Course, ‘The Chair’ is the penultimate fence on the first circuit of the Grand National and, along with the Water Jump, is jumped just once.
Neverthless,’The Chair’ stands 5’3″ high and is preceded by a 6′ wide ditch, making it both the highest and widest obstacle on the Grand National Course. Furthermore, the landing side is 6″ higher than the take-off side, so the fence is a spectacular, if formidable, test for horse and rider; its positioning, in front of the grandstand, is no accident.

Originally known as the ‘Monument Jump’, ‘The Chair’ took its name, quite literally, from the chair which, historically, stood on a concrete plinth alongside the fence. In the early days of steeplechasing, when races were run in heats, the chair was occupied by the so-called ‘distance judge’, whose job it was to gauge the distance between one finisher and the next. Essentially, any horse that had failed to pass the distance judge when the previous finisher crossed the winning line was declared ‘distanced’ or, in other words, beaten 40 lengths or more. Any such horse was considered a non-finisher and, hence, disqualified from participating in subsequent heats. Understandably, for safety reasons, the concrete plinth was replaced by a plastic replica in Nineties, but the original can still be seen in the Red Rum Garden at Aintree.

Historically, there was a time when every schoolboy – or, at least, every schoolboy with a slightly misspent youth – knew that the Grand National was run over an advertised distance of four-and-a-half miles. Of course, that was before 2013, when safety measures included moving the start forward, about a hundred yards closer to the first fence, with the result that the race was run over the shorter advertised distance of four miles and three-and-a-half furlongs. Thus, the last Grand National to be run over four-and-a-half miles was the 2012 renewal which, fittingly, also produced the closest ever finish, with Neptune Collonges beating Sunnyhillboy by a nose.

However, Aintree, along with every other National Hunt racecourse in Britain, was subsequently professionally surveyed and re-measured, along a line two yards from the inside rail rather than down the middle of the track, as had traditionally been the case. Not unexpectedly, the change in methodology lead to traditional race descriptions becoming shorter; since 2016, the Grand National has been run over an advertised distance of four miles and two-and-half furlongs, or an exact, ‘baseline’ distance of four miles, two furlongs and 74 yards. However, notwithstanding the earlier changes, horses still travel exactly the same distance they did prior to 2016.