The race meeting planned for Slusovice in August will not be held, due to the extreme weather in recent days. The heatwave has put Slusovice racecourse more of less out of action, and the organisers have called the August meeting off. For the moment, the racing calendar has been slimmed down, but it does seem that the most reasonable decision has been made.
Yet another race meeting has been affected by the weather conditions. According to the Jockey Club website, the meeting scheduled to be run at Slusovice on Saturday, August 17th has been cancelled, and no alternative date has been announced.
On the Slusovice racecourse website, Zdenek Karlach explains that there has been no rain on the racecourse for two months, and that the weather forecast is for more very hot weather. He says he is not able to get the course prepared and have it in a fit state for racing.
Dostihovy Svet (and the other horse-racing websites) are full of interesting interviews these days. Kateřina Jupová recently interviewed Pavel Slozil for the Dostihovy Svet Czech language pages. Pavel has been a major personality in Czech racing for a long time.
The decision to start racing at 8 a.m. at Pardubice last Sunday was widely considered to be correct. Now, with the hot weather continuing, it has been announced that Saturday's 7-race meeting at Lysa-nad-Labem will begin at 6 p.m. However, Sunday's meeting at Karlovy Vary will have the first race at the normal time, 2.30 p.m.
There have been big thunderstorms over much of the country at the beginning of the week, and it is likely that there will be good going at the weekend meetings.
Racing took place at Pardubice on Sunday, July 28th, on a day when it was forecast that we would have the highest temperatures ever recorded in the Czech Republic. It was decided a few days in advance to bring the first race forward to 8 in the morning! Your correspondent had suffered a slight heatstroke a couple of days earlier, and concluded it would be much better not to go to Pardubice.
Please note that, due to the very hot weather, which is forecast to peak on Sunday, the meeting at Pardubice this weekend will begin at 8 a.m.!!!
Efforts are being made to have the racetrack fit for steeplechasing, but some real rain from the sky would help in a way that artificial irrigation of the extensive crosscountry, hurdles and classical steeplechase courses will not be able to achieve, despite best efforts and the recent improvements to the irrigation system.
The meeting at Pardubice on Sunday, July 28th has attracted fields of ten and more for eight of the nine races, all of them over obstacles, and a field of seven for the other race. Not only the size but also the good quality of the fields makes this new July meeting at Pardubice a very interesting prospect.
According to the website of the Czech Jockey Club, the date for the Czech St Leger has been put back by one week, and the race is now scheduled to be run on Sunday, September 1st. This will allow an extra week for Prague Velka Chuchle racecourse to recover from the June floods, which covered the entire racecourse, and left some bare patches where the water lay on the surface for a long time.
Most racecourse held its second major race meeting of the season, following the successful Derby day, which was transferred to Most at short notice following the floods in Prague at the end of June. On Oaks day, the weather was again pleasantly mild, and the going was only slightly on the firm side of good.
