Steeplechase: A Very British Sport : Horse racing: Fans frown on ‘lager louts’ and flat racing. But today’s Grand National has all of the nation watching.

NEWBURY, England —  Geraldine Lester recognized those hooligans who were trashing central London last weekend.

They’re the same sort as “those terrible people from the football terraces,” she said, referring to the drunken ruffians often seen in the crowds in the standing-only sections at soccer games.

Sometimes the English call them “lager louts,” sometimes “yobbos.” But whatever you call them, Lester and the great majority of the 30,000 other residents of this horse-loving market town in rural Berkshire have no use for them.

When the hooligans started showing up at the local racecourse, which is the town’s pride and joy, officials moved quickly to discourage them. Stewards limited the areas where alcoholic beverages are permitted and arranged for security men to meet busloads of city fans in the parking lot so they could turn away any obvious troublemakers.

Newbury’s is one of 59 United Kingdom racecourses and one of 40 with the tall hedges and water jumps that enable it to host that most British form of competition, the steeplechase. To visit it on any race day is to glimpse a tradition-loving England little spoiled by the modern world, much less yobbos.

Richard the Lion-Hearted is said to have offered the first horse-racing purse here at the end of the 12th Century--40 pounds to the knight who could gallop his steed fastest around a 3-mile course. Henry VIII imported horses and established an early stud, and Charles II became known as “the father of the English turf” in the 17th Century.

Modern British steeplechasing, which takes its name from cross-country races between church steeples and over hedgerows, draws smaller crowds and less betting than flat racing. But its fans are intensely loyal and sometimes seem almost as down on their flat-racing counterparts as they are on the lager louts.

“Jumping people are much nicer,” says Geraldine Lester’s husband, Geoff, a senior writer for the Sporting Life racing newspaper. “There’s not the snobbishness in jumping.”

“While (flat racing) has become a showcase for thoroughbreds that only Arab sheiks and the super-rich can afford, steeplechasing remains the province of dreams,” the Sunday Times wrote last month. “A horse with not a drop of blue blood in its veins, only recently unhitched from a milk cart, still has a chance of jumping its way to glory.”

Last month’s Cheltenham Gold Cup, one of the two premier steeplechasing events of the season in England, was won by Norton’s Coin, a 100-to-1 shot owned by Welsh farmer Sirrell Griffiths, who rides the horse daily.

The second of those premier events, the Grand National, will be run today at Aintree, near Liverpool, over what is widely regarded as the toughest steeplechase course in the country--4 1/2 miles and 30 jumps, some well over 6 feet high. This is the race that Hollywood and a young Elizabeth Taylor made famous in the film “National Velvet.”

Flat racing is “a bit more professional and a bit more intense” than steeplechasing, said Laurie Brannan, owner of Sportsguide Limited, a public relations firm that handles Newbury and several other racecourses. “Jump racing is more of a rural sport, really.”

A day at the races in Newbury is very much a family event. “You get them without their wife and kids on soccer grounds, and look what you get there,” Brannan said.

Men wear ties and coats, most likely tweed. Blue jeans are banned from the clubhouse--a rule that is policed by stewards who tend to be the epitome of “stiff upper lip” types.

There are no electronic tote boards here. Instead, agile signalmen known as “tic-tacs” pass the current odds to legal, trackside bookmakers through an elaborate system of hand movements. Like most everyone else involved with the sport, it seems, the bookmakers tend to pass their craft on from father to son.

Famous jockeys and trainers mix freely with anyone who spends the $18 or so that it costs for a clubhouse pass.

Peter Scudamore, who won a record 222 of the nearly 600 jumping races he rode last year, said he earned the equivalent of about $145,000 for his efforts. “Flat jockeys could do that in five days,” he noted.

Scudamore and the 180 other licensed “jump jockeys” typically weigh 140 pounds or more--much too heavy for the smaller, flat racing thoroughbreds, but not so much that they can’t easily handle the big jumping horses.

“This is definitely physically harder because of the falls,” Scudamore said of his profession. It’s a rule of thumb that a steeplechase jockey falls at least once in every 10 rides.

Jenny Pitman, one of Britain’s most successful trainers, said that jumping horses are more like Clydesdales than the sleek thoroughbreds of American-style oval track racing. They don’t even start competing until an age when most flat-race horses have already wrapped up their brief careers and gone to stud.

“We know our horses,” said Pitman of the steeplechase crowd. “We have them for a lifetime. Our horses are babies at 5 and 6; a flat-race horse is old at 4.”

Most postwar Grand National winners were at least 8 years old, and many were 10, 11 or 12. So successful jumpers like the gray Desert Orchid are around long enough to become national institutions.

“An army of people who have never been racing love this horse,” Brannan said.

There are a lot more serious spills in steeplechasing than flat racing, of course. Last year 174 horses had to be destroyed after falling, about the same number as in each of the previous two years.

Some animal lovers say that’s too high a toll, and their voice is getting strong enough that one of Aintree’s most dangerous jumps, known as Beecher’s Brook, has been filled in for this year’s Grand National.

But the racing Establishment argues that the number of deaths is small relative to the 30,000 or more runners in a 10-month season. And there is no sign that they’ll give in to those who would like to ban steeplechasing any easier than they will to lager louts.