Racing at Easter

[runandskip]

As far as I know the world didn’t end by staging a million pound race day on Good Friday so maybe racing allergy to staging big races at Easter will cease?
Why not stage the Scottish national or the aintree meeting at Easter? That way we can have a settled April programme and not the mess we have this year

[DrummerBoy]

Problem is that (unlike every other week of the year), Easter moves from year to year, it can be any time from the end of March to the end of April. So those feature races would be all over the place

[runandskip]

My thought was that aintree Ayr etc would be on the same weekends every here and if that fell on Easter week then so be it

[stevecaution]

I think Aintree has always had to move to fit in with Easter when necessary. In years gone by it would have meant the Friday of the Aintree meeting falling on Good Friday and that would not have been possible.

Easter was so late this year it nearly clashed with the 2000 Guineas!

Thanks for the good crack. Time for me to move on. Be lucky.

[Drone]

Easter can fall on any Sunday between March 22nd and April 25th (Good Friday 20th and 23rd) so staging Aintree or Ayr would be a non-starter as they could almost immediately follow Cheltenham or be six weeks apart; or the Scottish National could precede the Aintree National; or either could fall on the same Saturday as the Lincoln or Whitbread.

Staging a well-endowed AW meeting on Good Friday is an ideal solution as unlike NH and Flat there’s a negligible pattern to the AW programme, so it yoyoing between the above dates doesn’t really matter; though I suppose a conflict with the established Winter Derby could occur during an early Easter

We have, at last, racing on the Good Friday bank holiday and the BHA etc are to be applauded for introducing a meeting wholly suited to it

[Author]

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