They are the two highest-rated chasers of all time - just what set them apart?

The modern jumps scene would be almost unrecognisable to a time-travelling racegoer from the 1960s who saw the two greatest steeplechasers of all time, stablemates Arkle and Flyingbolt.

This week's When Horses Raced series has established that champion jumpers of the past were campaigned very differently to those of today, often in the number of races they were asked to contest, but the achievements of Arkle and Flyingbolt show an even more striking contrast in the severity of their tasks, specifically in handicaps.

Luca Cumani once said that handicaps were a form of communism, yet they dominated jumps racing until the creation of the current Pattern in the early 1990s. Triple Cheltenham Gold Cup hero Arkle and Champion Chase winner Flyingbolt had to run in handicaps, under crushing burdens of up to 12st 10lb and giving lumps of weight to top-class rivals, because there was no alternative if their connections wanted to pick up a reasonable amount of prize-money.