Horses better jumpers these days? Or fences a lot easier?

[eddie case]

Is it my imagination or are there a lot less fallers over fences these days, week by week goes by with few fallers. Tracks like Haydock & Sandown seem to go meeting by meeting with hardly any fallers.
Think it would be interesting to see the percentage of fallers to runners now compared to 10, 20 and 30 years ago. I would expect a big drop recently.
What is the reason for this? Find it hard to believe horses are better jumpers but are tracks making fences a lot easier for horses to get over?

[cjboy]

I think there’s a bit of both. Training and schooling techniques have improved, this is also the reason humans run much faster now than only 50 years ago.

However, fences are much softer now, so will penalise a mistake without necessarily decking the horse.

[Venusian]

The siting and construction of fences have improved considerably in the last 20 or 30 years.

Also, trainers in the UK and Ireland have at last learnt, and not before time, lessons fron the French regarding schooling, a department in which we’ve traditionally been pretty hopeless.

[BlackGold]

That being said, since the start of 2011 there have been many more fallers than usual, certainly fatal ones. Don’t know why, but you only have to scan the first few pages of the Memorials forum to see that up until a few weeks ago, there were fatal falls happening every few days and sometimes 2/3 a day.

[Author]

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