Weather causes Alexandra Park racing postponement tonight

Marketplace is one of the harness stars who will have to wait until Saturday. Photo / HRNZ

Auckland’s shocking weather has claimed tonight’s Alexandra Park harness racing meeting, which has been postponed until Saturday.

In a rare move for a harness racing meeting, as they are held on all-weather tracks, the high winds and constant rain made racing unsafe so stipendiary stewards called the meeting off early this afternoon.

The meeting moves to Saturday night but with one race deleted.

The meeting was set to be a crucial lead-up to next Friday’s five Group-1 race meeting at the same venue, with Thursday’s canned meeting scheduled to hold both the Oaks and Derby Preludes.

An almost identical meeting will now be held on Saturday night but with the last race, a maiden, canned because of restrictions around how long staff can work, with some doubling up from an Ellerslie meeting also being held just two kilometres away earlier on Saturday.

To assist the connections of horses who would have started in that maiden race HRNZ will add a new maiden race to next Friday’s massive meeting, with the stake raised from $15,000 to $20,000 and preference given to horses who were in the now deleted race.

Moving the meeting means a very rare occasion with all three codes racing in Auckland on the same day: the Manukau greyhounds starting at 11.20am on Saturday morning before Ellerslie starts at 11.40am.

Almost all bets on the meeting scheduled for today have been refunded by the TAB but the betting agency is sticking solid on its ”Box Seat Boosted Bet”, having given a $3 price for a $100 maximum bet on Beside Me to win the Northern Oaks Prelude.

TAB bookmaker Ben Grimstone confirms the special bet will stand even though Beside Me was in from $3 to $1.70 this afternoon.

Horses who had been scratched from today’s programme are eligible to go back into the fields for Saturday.

The Alexandra Park meeting will now run alongside a huge programme from Addington.

There is no domestic horse or dog racing allowed on either Good Friday or Easter Sunday.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.