Cheltenham confident big meeting will survive rain

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Market Rasen, Cork and Fairyhouse all fell foul of the elements on Sunday, while yesterday's Lingfield programme and today's Leicester fixture were also abandoned.

While Cheltenham clerk of the course Simon Claisse admits Prestbury Park could be hit by further rain during the week, he is confident that Saturday's card will survive.

"We remain soft on both the chase and hurdle courses after the weekend rain, with a forecast of plenty more rain to come," said Claisse.

"As we found after the abandoned meeting in December like many places we will be vulnerable to that intensity of rain in a short time.

"That is not being forecast for us on Friday and Saturday, so I'm sure we'll be fine in terms of the amount of rainfall we will take.

"We would have raced yesterday after 20 millimetres of rain over the weekend and we have no standing water. We have nothing forecast ahead of us that is any worse than that so we'd be very hopeful."

It is a similar story at Doncaster with clerk of the course David Williams also confident of Saturday's valuable fixture going ahead despite more rain forecast.

"We have had rain here so I have changed the going to good to soft," said Williams.

"It's going to be a mixed bag with showers expected in the coming week. We are expecting it to dip down to around freezing at night and at the moment they are forecasting a significant amount of rain on Thursday.

"If that happens, we could be looking at soft ground on Saturday."

Officials at Uttoxeter are hoping the rain predicted from the middle of the week is not too severe ahead of their weekend card with the going already soft, heavy in places.

"The forecast is then for rain from tomorrow night to Friday morning," said clerk of the course Keith Ottesen.

"We hope we got the lower end of the forecast, but we won't know for sure until the end of the week."