What is the Fighting Fifth Hurdle?

Run over 2 miles and 46 yards at Newcastle in late November or early December, the Fighting Fifth Hurdle has the distinction of being the first Grade 1 race of the National Hunt season over the smaller obstacles. The ‘Fighting Fifth’ was a nickname earned by the 5th (Northumberland) Regiment of Foot – latterly the Northumberland Fusiliers and nowadays part of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers – during the Peninsula War against France in the early nineteenth century.

The Fighting Fifth Hurdle was established in 1969 – the same year that the National Hunt Pattern came into being – and, although initially awarded Grade 2 status, was promoted to Grade 1 status by the Jump Pattern Committee in 2004. The race is, in fact, the first leg of the so-called ‘Triple Crown of Hurdling’, which also comprises the Christmas Hurdle at Kempton and the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham.

The two most successful horses in the history of the Fighting Fifth Hurdle were Comedy Of Errors (1972, 1973, 1974) and Bird’s Nest (1976, 1977, 1979), with three wins apiece, but the roll of honour reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of two-mile hurdling talent over the past six decades. As is the case with the other two ‘Triple Crown’ races, Nicky Henderson is the leading trainer in the history of the Fighting Fifth Hurdle. Including a dead-heat in 2021, Henderson has won the race seven times, with Landing Light (2001), Punjabi (2008), My Tent Or Yours (2013), Buveur d’Air (2017, 2018), and Epatante (2020, 2021); all bar Landing Light were owned by Irish billionaire John Patrick ‘J.P.’ McManus.

The 2022 renewal of the Fighting Fifth Hurdle is scheduled for Saturday, November 26, but could be a little one-sided if the ante-post betting is anything to go by. Constitution Hill, trained by Nicky Henderson, was a wide-margin winner of the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival and, as such, has been installed at prohibitive odds of 1/3 ante-post.