Festival opener hinges on inspection

Mar 12 2013

Cheltenham will have to pass a 10.30am inspection if the opening day of the Festival meeting is to go ahead.

Although the covers were put down at the track over the weekend, officials report the track to be frozen in a few places this morning after a wind chill of -12C overnight.

Clerk of the course Simon Claisse said: "We are frozen in places but it seems to be small areas. We can't really tell the extent of the frozen areas until we start to take the covers up. If the weather does what we expect it to and the temperature gets up to 3C by 12 noon, we should be kicking off as planned at 1.30pm."

He added: "The wind chill dropped to -12C overnight and it was still -9C at 5am today.