News Big Kelso meeting rescheduled for Sunday

Big Kelso meeting rescheduled for Sunday

racing

Last Saturday's abandoned meeting at Kelso has been rescheduled to take place at the Borders venue on Sunday.

The track was due to stage one of its most high-profile fixtures of the season, with the Premier Chase set to feature the Nigel Twiston-Davies-trained Betfair Chase hero Bristol De Mai and Sandy Thomson's locally-based Grand National hope Seeyouatmidnight, among others.

The quality card, which also features the Premier Hurdle, was abandoned last Wednesday due to snow, but course officials in conjunction with the British Horseracing Authority have moved to save the meeting.

Kelso clerk of the course Anthea Morshead said: "I can't stress enough how grateful we are to the BHA and all our race sponsors, who have remained the same from the original fixture.

"It will be a £103,000 meeting and we have an additional race - a two-mile 0-100 handicap hurdle - to form a seven-race card.

"We have been in touch with Sandy Thomson, Nigel Twiston-Davies, Sue Smith and Paul Nicholls, who were all keen to support the meeting if we could reschedule.

"Obviously Seeyouatmidnight needs to run over fences to qualify for the Grand National, so to give him the opportunity to do so at his local track and give people the opportunity to see him is great."

Morshead is hopeful the meeting will beat the weather at the second attempt.

She said: "Although we do still have some snow on the track, we are forecast milder temperatures for the rest of the week.

"Tuesday is forecast to get up 5C and we could get some rain, and from Wednesday through to Saturday it's forecast to be dry with temperatures of 6C each day.

"Hopefully we'll have a great day's racing and we can't thank everyone enough for all their help."

New entries for the rescheduled fixture will be made on Tuesday, with declarations made on Friday.