The team behind the new age of frangible fences as seen for the first time in Britain last season are travelling the world to share their knowledge and learn new ideas.
A range of traditional-looking fences, which incorporated a frangible “parallelogram” chassis, were seen for the first time at Thoresby 2025 (news, 27 March and 3 April).
Course-designer, organiser and new chairman of the FEI risk management steering group Stuart Buntine, Swedish inventor Mats Bjornetun, who is behind MIM clip frangible technology, and members of Mr Buntine’s course-building team worked together on the designs. One of their main aims was to design classic-looking cross-country fences that happen to be deformable, rather than jumps that stood out as being frangible because of their “space age” appearance.
The team, which includes course-builders Will Seely and Chris Eaton, worked with 16 builders and designers from Australia and New Zealand to create deformable fences during an FEI seminar in Victoria, Australia, this month. They will repeat the seminar in Germany in February.
“Our brief was stand back, let them do and then interject where possible,” said Mr Eaton. “But in actual fact, I found that we were watching what’s going on and quizzing them as much as they’re quizzing us as to actually, ‘Is there a better way of doing that? Have you done it better? Can we educate you or can you educate us?’
“We’ve already seen a couple of different methods, and we’ve talked through the pros and cons in different ways of doing it.
“The important thing is, we’re trying to build fences that people are used to seeing out on cross-country courses that are not frangible and we can add a safety element to that fence without changing the look of it too much.
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“It’s the sort of fence that you know – the average roll top, log, house – all these things can be made frangible. We want to keep moving things forward, but I think a lot of people started to get an expectation that these new safety fences were going to change what cross-country was all about [which isn’t the case].”
Mr Seely added: “The whole thing we’ve done back at home is to try to push the frangibles forward and get away from the space age look and go [towards looking] more traditional.
“If we can spread across the world and make people happier using it, because they’re producing a more traditional looking cross-country course, we’re doing good and pushing safety forwards. We just keep pushing the parameters to make things safer and better.”
Mr Buntine said this was the “first of a number of courses” planned globally.
“The whole frangible debate is an interesting one. I think I was like most people, very sceptical when it first started. I was a traditionalist at heart,” he said.
“A number of incidents have occurred over the last six or eight years whereby I’ve really started to look at it and say, the future of the sport has a dependency on us to provide sport that is safe, that takes in human safety and horse welfare.”
“I think the great thing from our point of view is the FEI’s got behind supporting the expansion of the use of frangible fences.”
He added: “We’re off to Germany in February. Then, we’d love to take our knowledge and share it around the world, but also learn from others because everybody’s got so much to learn in this game.”
Lucy is an experienced news journalist, reporter and presenter. Since joining the Horse & Hound team in 2015, Lucy has reported from major global sporting events including the Tokyo Paralympic Games and multiple European Championships, as well as Badminton, Burghley and London, to name a few. She has covered current affairs and sports news across the full spectrum of equestrian disciplines and racing, as well as human and equine welfare, industry news and court cases.
