3 minute read

Feature events on course to go ahead.

Saturday's high-profile fixtures at Newbury and Newcastle are set to go ahead despite the damage caused across Britain by Storm Arwen on Friday night.

It is the biggest day of the National Hunt season at Newcastle, with the Betfair Fighting Fifth Hurdle the main attraction.

Clerk of the course James Armstrong arrived at Gosforth Park on Saturday morning following what he described as a "horrendous" night, but is optimistic the meeting will go ahead in its entirety.

"It's been a long week," Armstrong told Sky Sports Racing just after 10am.

"We watered earlier in the week to keep it safe and we've had 35 millimetres of rain in the last 24 hours, but it's genuinely not much worse than good to soft.

"You couldn't have raced this morning as we had four or five furlongs of running rail down in the back straight and a few hoardings have blown around and smashed through some permanent running rail.

"We've had to make quite a lot of repairs and our ground staff have had to clear driveways of broken trees last night.

"It was pretty horrendous last night – I've not seen weather like that in this country before.

"But the winds have abated hugely and the forecast is for it to drop away, so things are looking very favourable at the moment."

Newbury, which stages the Ladbrokes Trophy, posted on Twitter on Saturday morning: "There is no scheduled inspection ahead of today's racing, but we will be monitoring wind speeds closely."

It was not good news everywhere, however, with clerk of the course Andrew Morris having no option but to call off proceedings at Bangor before daybreak.

He said: "We've had no power since around 2am and the latest update is we won't get power back to the site until around 4pm, so that is obviously one factor.

"The second factor is there's been damage to some of the public areas and they're deemed to be unsafe.

"It's not long-term damage, it's just with the timescale we had this morning and the wind being as strong as it was, it was an easy decision on safety grounds."

Wolverhampton's Saturday evening card must pass a second precautionary check if it is to go ahead due to snow.

Sunday's meetings at Carlisle and Leicester are both subject to precautionary inspections at 8am due to the threat of frost.