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“Carry On Racing,” starring the late, great, Sid James as owner of Newcastle racecourse, the late, great, Kenneth Williams as the CEO of the BHA and the late, great, Barbara Windsor as ITV Racing pundit “Progressive Sort.”
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"To be fair, it’s not the first All-Weather card to be lost to the, err, weather.
In fact, IIRC the first ever AW card at Southwell was abandoned because while the track was fine, the approach roads to the racecourse were snowbound.
But abandoning 30 minutes before the first, with little in the way of advance warning?
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"It is quite incredible that they evidently thought it was raceable until jockeys and trainers turned up and told them it wasn’t.
This is an artificial surface – it doesn’t vary in its consistency – they should know at what temperature and moisture it ceases to be fit for purpose.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"I thought that it had to be harrowed/turned over to in these type conditions to break up any potential areas where the surface can freeze together?
Maybe they need to give Wolverhampton a call to see how they managed to get their own Tapeta surface ready for racing despite the fact that they would be more affected by significantly lower and falling temperatures due to the sun going down before the first race.
To quote shyster lawyer Lionel Hutz from The Simpsons ‘this is the most blatant case of false advertising since my suit against the movie The Neverending Story.’
Tracks in the US (dirt and AW) mix salt into the surface for the winter to prevent freezing. Does Newcastle do that?
Abandoned today as well. It was a fixture scheduled at short notice because of all the fixtures that have been abandoned.
That worked well.
“Tracks in the US (dirt and AW) mix salt into the surface for the winter to prevent freezing. Does Newcastle do that?”
Do they, or is that perhaps a little too logical an idea?
Cork All Stars says
Abandoned today as well. It was a fixture scheduled at short notice because of all the fixtures that have been abandoned.
Just one response is adequate to that, Auf wiedersehen pet (I mean Newcastle)
The best things in life are free.
But you can give them to the birds and bees.It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the CoC and/or ground staff at Newcastle on Saturday were irresponsible and/or incompetent.
It shouldn’t take jockeys and trainers pushing a stick in and pointing out it’s frozen beyond an inch down to alert them to an unraceable track.
But in some ways Cheltenham and Doncaster were worse.
I’m new to the concept of frost covers and their optimal use, they’re not.
And yet after just 48 hours I and just about everyone can see that if covers are useless is you don’t get them down while it’s still above freezing you don’t risk Saturday cards by racing on the Friday and consequently not being able to get covers dive until after racing by which time it’s sub zero.
Elite sport prioritises Saturday for a reason – it’s the nation’s main day of leisure.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"According to Dave Ord on yesterday’s “Luck on Sunday “ the rules of racing obliged Cheltenham to fulfil Friday’s fixture if the track was fit to race on .
Fair enough, and thank you for that – but maybe the rules of racing need amending as a televised Saturday card is surely infinitely more important to the industry than a Friday one.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"I seem to recall that the fleece covers work to around about temperatures of -4C to -5C and from what I understand it was -5C on the Friday night at Cheltenham, so there is an argument to say that had they been able to keep the covers down and not raced Friday the Saturday meeting might still have been abandoned anyway.
To me common sense told you that racing on Friday was going to put Saturday’s meeting in much greater danger simply because of the logistics of getting covers down (3hrs in total) after racing had finished meant that with the sun going down by then the temperature was already going to be border line freezing before they even got started thus leaving the course exposed for a lot of those 3hrs.
That being said, I do feel a bit sorry for them because if they had not raced Friday (even if they were given special dispensation because the rules said they had to race if the ground was raceable, which it clearly was) and left the covers down and Saturday still ended up being abandoned then people would have moaned about not racing Friday and losing two days racing instead of one.
Either way they were going to get criticised for doing the wrong thing and with the weather not playing ball it was always going to be iffy whatever the decided to do.
For me Newcastle was the bigger issue as it is starting to look like the cotc/groundstaff didn’t prepare the ground correctly in the first place by not going deep enough with the harrowing….Wolverhampton seem to get it right in their prep work and they were racing in the evening when temperatures were much lower.
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