The feature race meeting at Caulfield has been called off after heavy overnight rain damaged the judge’s box and race day facilities in the grandstand.
Melbourne Racing Club (MRC) track manager Jason Kerr said 125mm of rain had fallen on the course overnight to 8.05am on Saturday at which time the meeting was called off.
“We’ve got some fairly major flooding and water damage in the grandstand areas which basically renders the grandstand and our judge’s box and raceday facilities out of action for the day,” Kerr told radio Sport National.
Racing Victoria stewards were to inspect the track at 10am but Kerr said the water damage combined with the track conditions and the weather to come made the decision not to race inevitable.
“It was a fairly straight forward decision once we’d seen the damage in the stands,” he said.
The Caulfield track had been rated a heavy 10 following the rain after being a good 3 on Friday.
MRC chief executive Alisdair Robertson said the power had gone down in the grandstand in the early hours of the morning due to water seepage.
He said the club had spoken to key trainers with runners at Caulfield and they preferred that the meeting not be transferred to the Geelong synthetic track.
“We are talking to RVL (Racing Victoria) regarding reprogramming key races to Wednesday at Betfair Park (Sandown),” he said
Robertson said three races could be added to the Sandown program to make it a 10-race card.
Three of the eight races were Listed events and lead ups to feature events over the Festival of Racing which is to be launched on Monday.
The provincial meeting at Kyneton and the picnic meeting at Buchan were also abandoned due to the wet weather.
‘;
} else if (google_ads.length 1) {
for (i = 0; i ‘ +
‘
‘ + google_ads[i].line1 + ‘
‘ +
‘
‘ + google_ads[i].line2 + ‘ ‘ + google_ads[i].line3 + ‘
‘ +
‘
‘ + google_ads[i].visible_url + ‘
‘;
s += ‘