THE inaugural Shelfield Park race meeting has been cancelled due to the weather.
The decision was made after Sunday’s downpour on top of a winter of torrential rain and storms.
Landowner and chair of the fixture Patty Allen said although the course, between Alcester and Studley, had stood up well to the rain it was too difficult for the emergency services to access.
“It’s catastrophic and really I’m absolutely gutted but we had to think of the welfare of the jockeys and do the sensible thing,” she said.
“Although there was some concern about the lorries on site we felt we could manage it but with more rain forecast we could see that the emergency vehicles wouldn’t be able to properly access the course and so we took the very difficult but correct decision to abandon.”
The race had been due to go ahead this Saturday, March 21, and was born out of the closure of the Upton-on-Severn point-to-point meeting.
Patty said they’d looked at several locations before it struck her that they could run the event in Shelfield on home turf.
She added that, due to ongoing concerns of the coronavirus the meeting would not be re-scheduled for later in the year but would instead run next year.
“We’ve already started planning it, and having spoken to sponsors most of them are onside even at this early date,” she said.
“So that’s all good news and we’re all looking forward to next year.”
