Hastings Happenings

Sunday morning was another beautiful, fairly warm and comfortable morning. The weather and the excitement of opening day not too far away brought out several owners to watch their pride and joys train.

The track is in perfect shape for this time of year with the help of the weather this year as I can never remember spring training being this dry and warm.

We noticed several horses working and my guess would be well over 50 were set down and several trainers had stop watches in their hands. The official Hastings Clockers actually start recording work-outs tomorrow.

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Note to Horsemen
With the change ver to daylight savings time on Sunday morning the track for the next while will open at 7:30am and close at 11:30am for training, at least until it starts getting a little lighter in the am.

The Hastings Clockers take their positions starting tomorrow, Tuesday, March 10th and starting gate is scheduled to open on Thursday.

Horsemen should note that the track will be open seven days a week starting March 23rd and will be open for five Mondays leading up to opening day. The track will be open on March 23rd, March 30th, April 6th, April 13th and April 20th. This should really help getting more horses ready to enter coming opening weekend.

Horsemen’s Associations Meet
The three racing associations and track management meet again this evening, March 9th, to discuss several industry matters as we near opening of the 2015 live season at Hastings.
One of our local veterinarians, Rob Leakos, stopped his truck purposely on Sunday morning to tell me that he thought several of the Incentive Programs being offered by the associations were working very well to aid the industry and he especially noted that several of our breeders were back breeding again which was music to my ears.

British Columbia Horse Racing Industry Management Committee
The BCHRIMC meet again this coming Friday, March 13th.

Good news from the committee is that we are running slightly above budget for January and February. That is amazing as the east coast of the USA has had severe weather for all of January and February and still several cancellations of race days in March already. The national average was down over 3% in February because of all of the cancellations of race programs but we stayed above water.

The really sad part is the number of programs available for wagering are pretty sparse for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday’s and actually Thursday aren’t all that productive any more either.

Where we used to have five good days of simulcast racing we are now down to just three.

Workouts to be Posted Wednesdays
The track starts recording workouts tomorrow morning the Derby Newsletter will post the Hastings workouts everyday starting on Wednesday morning.

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