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The immediate fate of the 2019 Albury Gold Cup meeting will be resolved in the next 24 hours by Racing NSW officials.

Racing NSW chief executive Peter V’Landys has instructed his racing management team to investigate if a suitable date is available in the next month to save the $470,000 program of eight races.

The meeting featuring the $180,000 Albury Gold Cup was abandoned on Friday after a morning downpour drenched the track.

“Peter V’Landys has told us he doesn’t want to see so much prizemoney lost to the industry,” said Albury Racing Club chief executive Steve Hetherton.

“Ideally the entire program can be rescheduled to another date in April with fresh nominations.

“We would be happy with that but there would only be a few suitable dates. It could be difficult with the Wagga Cup carnival to be run in the first week of May.”

Hetherton said another option could be to wait until the spring and schedule the Albury Gold Cup for an existing Albury TAB date to ensure the feature race is run in 2019.

The Albury Cup has drawn the biggest race day crowd of any country meeting in NSW for more than a decade. At least 14,000 were expected to attend last Friday’s meeting.

While some 5000 still filled the booked marquees and functions at the track on Friday afternoon the abandonment leaves the ARC facing a severe financial loss.

Hetherton said the club would be also be having discussions with Racing NSW about the apparent failure of a $1.5 million track drainage renovation project, completed in 2017, to cope with Friday’s heavy rain.

Stewards were forced to postpone the meeting on safety grounds due to surface water that did not drain away two hours after the track was hit by an intense storm dumping 30mm of rain on the track in an hour.

Racing NSW industry general manager Scott Kennedy said: "I am disappointed the meeting could not be run. We will determine any remediation that is required, to enable the track to better handle such heavy rain.

"We will work to find a suitable date to run the Albury Cup and save the prizemoney for the participants."

ARC chairman Mark Cronin took part in a track inspection with stewards and supported their decision to cancel the meeting after a helicopter had hovered over the worst affected areas for 30 minutes in a bid to disperse the surface water.

"There were a couple of areas there I have to concede had the potential to be unsafe," Cronin said.

Experienced Sydney jockeys Glyn Schofield, Christian Reith and Grant Buckley also took part in the inspection.

Many riders have supported the ARC amid unfounded reports that the track had been watered on Thursday night prior to the storms that hit Albury.

After a sustained dry period the track was lightly irrigated on Wednesday ahead of the City Handicap meeting on Thursday that was run a Good 4 surface and no further water was applied.

There was no mention of storms in Albury weather forecasts in the days leading up to the carnival. They were added to the local forecast on Thursday.

Leading Albury jockey Nick Souquet said nobody could be blamed for Friday's postponement.

Souquet had several rides on Thursday and said the track raced perfectly.

"The storm was just one of those things and it was a freak of nature what happened on Friday morning. It's nobody's fault,” Souquet said.

"I think any track that gets renovated takes at least two years before it settles down.

"I'm not going to pot the track and will reserve my judgement.”