QUEENSLAND RACING AND THE DAMAGE BILL FOR THE WEEKEND WEATHER WIPEOUT

By Graham Potter | Sunday, July 4, 2021

The start of the new financial year didn’t bring a windfall to racing participants in Queensland. Just the opposite. It brought a wipeout … for the short-term at least.

And it had nothing to do with Covid-19. This was good old fashion nature taking charge with rainfall ruling the day.

In the first four days of July, fifteen race meetings were scheduled to take place in Queensland. Two (Sunshine Coast and Warwick) were abandoned, but rescheduled to next week. Five meetings (Barcaldine, Clermont, Gold Coast, Warra and Wondai) were abandoned altogether, and another three meetings (Kilcoy, Ipswich and Toowoomba) were abandoned before even reaching their halfway mark.

The five meetings to survive were Cunnamulla, MacKay, Oak Park (a double header) and Stamford.

This meant that no less than sixty-two individual races were lost at a cost of $1 660 200 – the breakdown being Barcaldine (5 races worth $37 250), Clermont (5 - $44 250 – including the Clermont Cup), Gold Coast (8 - $176 000) Ipswich (6 - $150 00), Kilcoy (6 - $102 000), Sunshine Coast (9 - $830 000), Toowoomba (5 - $100 000), Warwick (8 - $136 000) Warra (5 - $47 450 – including the Wambo Cup) and Wondai (5 - $37 250).

$966 000 of that $1 660 200 has been saved with the transferring of the Sunshine Coast meeting (to next Sunday) and the Warwick meeting (to Wednesday).

The expectation of stakeholders will be that extra races will be programmed by Racing Queensland to help meet that prize-money deficit.

An extra race, worth $35 000, has already been added to the program for the meeting at Doomben on July 7 with the obvious hope being that, with everybody already doing it tough in these difficult times, the same is done with upcoming provincial and country meetings.

At this stage the weather forecast for South-East Queensland for the coming week is encouraging with no rain expected to be in play until Thursday and Friday when showers are predicted on both of those days.

The next meeting scheduled in Queensland is the Townsville meeting on Tuesday where the track is currently rate as a soft 5.