Runners stay in their lanes the entire way after starting out of the blocks and must clear ten hurdles that are evenly spaced around the track.

The hurdles are positioned and weighted so that they fall forward if bumped into with sufficient force, to prevent injury to the runners.

While running the course, participants had to clear twelve wooden hurdles, over 100 centimetres tall, that had been spaced in even intervals.

As a result, the official distance was fixed to 400 metres, or one lap of the stadium, and the number of hurdles was reduced to ten.

A special edition of the Women's 400m Hurdles took place in the 1980 IAAF World Championships in Athletics in response to the Women's 400m Hurdles not being included at the boycotted 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and Liberty Bell Classic.

This is a view held by German athletic coach Norbert Stein, "All this means that the women's hurdles for specialists, who are the target group to be dealt with in this discussion, is considerably depreciated in skill demands when compared to the men's hurdles.

This was the case at the World Championships in Seville and the same problem can often be seen at international and national meetings.

To be able to maintain a good hurdling technique throughout the race it is important to work on step patterns.

A stutter step is when the runner has to chop his or her stride down to arrive on the "correct" leg for take off.

However, the trail leg must be kept bent and short to provide a quick lever action allowing a fast hurdle clearance.

Using a left lead leg on the bends allows the hurdler to run closer to the inside of the lane and cover a shorter distance.

However, fatigue from the race will knock athletes off their stride pattern and force runners to switch legs.

Some athletes have started choosing an even rhythm (Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone does 14 steps for most of her race).

The following athletes have had their personal best annulled due to doping offences: American athlete Glenn Davis had a prodigious start to his hurdling career, running his first race in April 1956 in 54.4 s. Two months later, he ran a new world record with 49.5 s and later that year he won the 400 m hurdles at the Olympics, and was also the first to repeat that feat in 1960.

In terms of success and longevity in competition, Edwin Moses' record is significant: he won 122 races in a row between 1977 and 1987 plus two gold medals, at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montréal and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.