Inspection cut-off time needed to stop racecourses treading

on thin ice

A better balance must be struck when frost-hit tracks stage multiple inspections to avoid race meetings being abandoned

Greg Wood The Guardian, Sunday 2 December 2012

Once the overnight temperatures dropped below freezing for the first time in a while it did not take long for racing to suffer its first multiple-inspection ritual for a while too. The seven-race card at Musselburgh on Friday was finally abandoned after four inspections, about an hour after the scheduled start time for the first race and scarcely two and a half hours before sunset. As is traditional in these situations, Harriet Graham, Musselburgh's clerk of the course, conceded defeat while also pointing out that "we gave it every chance".

Final confirmation that, after five hours of giving it every chance, there was now no chance at all led to some predictable jeers on Twitter and elsewhere from punters who felt that they had been strung along when there was no hope that racing could proceed.

At the track itself, meanwhile, as well as in cars and horseboxes that were probably still in the process of converging on the course, the cost will have been felt in terms not just of wasted time but of wasted money too. The overnight declarations included four horses from Ireland and a dozen from north Yorkshire, about 170 miles away. That is plenty of diesel.

At Leicester on Sunday however, a series of inspections during the morning produced a different outcome. The meeting eventually received the go-ahead about half-an-hour before the start of the first and the cogs of the racing industry were lubricated by the distribution of nearly £20,000 in prize money. Which is all that Graham was trying to achieve but without the same luck.

It is easy to criticise a clerk of the course when a meeting is abandoned after many inspections but more difficult to say what else they might have done, given the pressures and responsibilities that converge in their role.

Their job, after all, is to do all they can to ensure that the racecourse – which pays their salary each month – stages racing. If a card is abandoned, the board of directors will want to be sure there was a good reason. The track may well be insured against the loss of gate money but not the less predictable returns from the bars, food outlets and so on. And it is not like a factory that loses a day's output but makes it up the following week. If 1,000 would-be racegoers are turned away, they will not simply turn up the next time there is a card.

And the track will not lose any more money if they abandon it at 11am than they will at 8.30. So, if there is a little frost in the ground, the temperature is just above zero and the forecast is for a few extra degrees later on – pretty standard conditions in the winter months – then "giving it every chance" is what most of us would do in the same situation.

As has been pointed out before, a better way to balance these two competing interests, between owners who do not want to throw good money after bad and tracks which do not want to abandon unless it is absolutely necessary – would be a cut-off point at which, if the track is not raceable, chance is removed from the equation and the meeting is abandoned.

Some courses attract more local horses and crowds than others but between 90 minutes and two hours before the first – enough time to travel 60 or 70 miles – would reduce the amount of inconvenience for racegoers while ruling out very few – if any – meetings in an average year that might have otherwise gone ahead.