Cheltenham clerk of the course Simon Claisse is “thoroughly optimistic” of racing going ahead at the weekend following the putting down of frost covers on Sunday.
“On the basis of our forecast and the covers being down I’m thoroughly optimistic for the weekend ahead,” he told sportinglife.com.
“It got down to -4 overnight which has delayed the deployment of the covers – we have had to push it back from 10am to 11.30am and we’ve brought in an extra two dozen people to get the job done by the time the weather starts to go off again at about 4pm.”
The scale of the task is not one that Claisse is taking lightly, saying: “It is a laborious job and it takes at least 3 or 4 hours to get it done. You’re talking about an area the size of 25 football pitches, 400 bits of material, each about 400 sq metres and about 3500 pegs to go into the ground.
“We’re not only doing the running lines on the chase and hurdles course but we have to all the other bits that deliver the horses from the parade ring down to each start so there’s quite a lot to get done.”
Forecast for week ahead
The course successfully deployed frost covers for last-season’s New Year Day card and for Trials Day, and Claisse believes that this meeting has as good a chance of going ahead as they did.
“The beneficial thing from our point of view is that our soil temperature is still above 4 degrees, whereas in January when we deployed the covers before it’s only been some where between 2 and 3 degrees.
“Looking at the forecast for the week the worst frost is tonight (Sunday) which is at -8 on the ground and then it’s not so bad. Midweek it’s due to be -4 with daytime temperatures of 1 and 2 degrees, possibly getting a little bit warmer by the end of the week.”
With racing scheduled to begin at 12.10 on Friday, Claisse would be reluctant to move the card forward, saying: “We have to be a little bit careful about that.
“Obviously if we move the races forward and we have a little bit of frost under the cover then there’s less time for that frost to come out.
“We’ve covered the course before on a Friday after racing. What we can do is start our covering before the racing has finished and that is an option open to us and we’ve done it before.”
