Watering on hold as rain forecast at Cheltenham

Watering at Cheltenham is on hold ahead of the National Hunt Festival, which starts on Tuesday, with heavy rain forecast over the weekend.

Clerk of the course Simon Claisse said: “We are now good, good to firm in places on both tracks but the forecast is for substantial rain on Friday.

“We may get a bit of snow on Thursday night into Friday, a couple of millimetres, and then eight or nine millimetres of rain on Friday afternoon and evening, another four on Saturday and another six or seven on Sunday.

“We stopped watering last Friday and we said we’d make a judgement today based on further forecasts and with the forecast now for that quantity of rain over the weekend we are not watering at the moment.

“However, if that Friday rainfall doesn’t materialise we still have time to make a decision on Saturday to water over the weekend.”

Claisse and his team are working towards good or good to soft going for the Festival and he added: “So far we’ve put on about 26 millimetres all round.”