Racing:Both the Old Course and the New Course are to be covered as officials at Cheltenham bid to beat any threat from the predicted cold snap early next week.
Covers will be put on the Old Course, to be used on the first two days of the Festival (Tuesday and Wednesday), and the New Course, raced on the last two days (Thursday and Friday). Vulnerable parts of the cross country course, which will be in action on Tuesday, will also be covered.
Officials remain confident the Festival will go ahead as planned, but feel they need to take this action because of the importance of the fixture. “There is now a bit more certainty about the weather forecast for the next few
days and as everybody knows we have got overnight temperatures below freezing early next week,” said racecourse communications manager Andy Clifton. As we suggested previously, we are going to be putting down frost covers over the weekend as a precaution.
“We are covering both the Old course and the New course plus vulnerable areas of the cross country course which will be used on Tuesday.Daytime temperatures are forecast to be well above freezing all week so we
remain pretty confident racing will go ahead as planned, but given the importance of the meeting, we want to take the maximum amount of precautions.
“We are still forecast a daytime temperature tomorrow of 6C and it’s 9C or 10C now. It is not due to get below freezing until Sunday night, so we have got plenty of time.”