TWO races at an extended two miles over hurdles on the same card at Cheltenham last Saturday might have made for easy comparison were it not for the complicating matter of surface deterioration referred to elsewhere.

However, one thing that helped was that the Clerk of the Course, Simon Claisse, revealed that, not only were the overall hurdle distances the same as the day before, the hurdles themselves were in exactly the same positions. That is the kind of information that would be useful to know more generally.