An interesting two-day meeting will be held at Pardubice on Friday May 24^th and Saturday May 25th. The Friday meeting will consist of three ‘’bumpers”, followed by two hurdles races, all at Category IV, and the first race is at 5 p.m. This type of meeting is an innovation at Pardubice: it is unfortunate that the surprisingly large numbers of entries announced for the races last week have suffered from a considerable number of withdrawals (and some invalid entries) before the declaration stage. Nevertheless, a truly innovative evening of racing at Pardubice deserves some attention.

The main race of the Saturday afternoon meeting is the Town of Pardubice Stakes, Category I, 5 800 metres, cross-country, the first of the four qualification races for this year’s Velka Pardubicka, which will again be sponsored by Česká pojišťovna. There will be a strong field of 14 runners, attracted by the likelihood that the going will not be hard. Valldemoso, Klaus and Bremen Plan have already shown their credentials as VP horses in past years. There will also be two very interesting Vana-trained runners, Budapest and Ilion, which both have good records in Italy. Budapest, still only 8 years old, finished 2nd, 3rd, and 5th, in the 2010, 2011 and 2012 runnings of the Gran Premio at Merano. Six of Ilion’s seven wins in jumps races have come at Pisa, Treviso and Grosseto.

In another race on Saturday, 2009 Czech triple crown winner Age of Jape takes on a number of good horses on the Pardubice crosscountry course, for example, Tomis, Ohio, Charme Look and Frasini.         

There are nine races on the card on Saturday, and the first race is at 1 p.m.