CHELTENHAM Festival Trials Day is under serious threat with the course waterlogged in places – and more rain on the way.
A precautionary inspection has been called for 2pm Friday after heavy rainfall hammered the track overnight, leaving areas of standing water.
The valuable meeting is the last fixture due to be staged at jumps HQ before the Festival in mid-March.
The feature races on the £230k card include the Cleeve Hurdle and the Cotswold Chase, key trials for the Stayers’ Hurdle and Gold Cup.
If the meeting were today, clerk of the course Simon Claisse reckons he would just about be able to get racing on.
But the forecast is bleak, with further downpours expected over the next 48 hours.
Claisse said: “The ground is currently heavy, we had 15mm of rain last night which is a lot more than double what we were expecting.
“Up until this morning we’d had as much rain as we were expecting before racing and there’s more to come.
“We could get another 12mm tonight into tomorrow and then 10mm on Saturday morning. We were forecast 25mm for the week.
“At the moment we’re raceable but we’ll have to miss out a few fences – the first down the hill and the third last – so we’ve announced a precautionary inspection for 2pm tomorrow afternoon.
“We’ll need a lot of help from the weather in terms of the forecast being wrong and not getting as much rain as we’re seeing in the forecast.”
If Trials Day is abandoned, it will be the second fixture Cheltenham have lost to rain in less than a month, with the track’s traditional New Year’s Day card was also washed out.
Today’s meeting at Wetherby has been cancelled because of waterlogging, but Fakenham’s jumps card goes ahead.
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