Cheltenham and Doncaster frozen off

Sub-zero temperatures proved too much.

Saturday afternoon’s feature cards at Cheltenham have been abandoned after temperatures dropped to minus 5C overnight at both venues.

Frost sheets were deployed at Cheltenham after racing on Friday, but as the mercury began to drop it became a race against time.

It took clerk of the course Jon Pullin and his team around three hours to cover the whole of the New Course, which is used for the two-day International meeting, but in the end their efforts were in vain.

“Temperatures were at zero at the last on Friday and then we began to get the covers down, which we did through tremendous effort in three hours,” said Pullin.

“As we were laying them the temperatures were a consistent minus 1c/minus 2C and we’ve been a consistent minus 4C since midnight with a low of minus 5C.

“Unfortunately we have got areas of frozen ground under the covers.

“At least we managed to race on Friday. At this stage no decisions have been made about rescheduling any races.”

Doncaster were due to inspect at 9.30am for their meeting but just after 7.30am the decision had already been taken.

Unfortunately groundstaff were unable to get the covers down in time following repairs to the track after racing on Friday and temperatures reached -5C overnight.

Hereford staged an inspection at 7.30am ahead of their fixture on Saturday but pushed it back until 9.30am.

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