Horse racing has been using imperial measurements for hundreds of years, it is a sport which has tradition embedded in its DNA. Will racetracks adopt metric measurements?
The Final Furlong is a common phrase used by horse racing commentators that describes the final stretch of the race up to the finishing post.ġ mile or 8 furlongs or 80 chains or 1760 yards or 5280 feet or 1609.34 metres. It wasn’t until the 14 th Century when the furlong unit of measurement became standardised and has been used in the British imperial system up until the mid-1980’s.įast forward to the 21 st Century, the imperial measurement furlong is generally only used in horse racing. These words were used to determine the length of a furrow of an acre of a ploughed field. Dating back from around the ninth century during the Anglo-Saxon times, two Old English words were joined together, furh (furrow) and lang (long).
