Rain deals blow

WILD weather has forced the Oamaru Jockey Club to postpone its meeting scheduled for tomorrow until Wednesday.

Heavy overnight rain left the club’s officials, stipendiary stewards and New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing (NZTR) with little option but to call off tomorrow’s racing.

The Oamaru track is as saturated as track manager Greg Stuart has ever seen it.

‘‘Right around the track, it is just not handling the water.

‘‘It is right across the road at the main gate.’’

The majority of both of Oamaru’s grass track for thoroughbred racing and the allweather harness track were covered in surface water, Stuart said.

‘‘There is no passing lane on the trottingtrack. It is flooded right to the outside of the track at the 2000m mark.’’

NZTR announced yesterday that the meeting would be transferred to Wednesday and that all scratchings would be reinstated.

Tomorrow’s meeting is the second raceday the Oamaru club has had to reschedule this season.

Its Thurday, October 20 meeting was moved to Monday, October 24 when the track was declared unsafe for racing.

The bad weather across New Zealand has caused havoc with racing weekend.

Yesterday’s Te Aroha meeting was called off after overnight wind damage to the main grandstand.

Even though the track was safe to race on, the state of the grandstand was such that the venue could not operate in a safe manner.

Repair work is scheduled to be carried out over the weekend and the meeting has been rescheduled for Monday.

Like Oamaru, there will be no change to the originally released Te Aroha fields and scratchings will be reinstated.

The Opunake Cup meeting at New Plymouth, scheduled for today, has also been postponed until tomorrow.

‘‘We had to make an early decision and let everyone know about our meeting,’’ Taranaki Racing Inc chief executive officer Carey Hobbs said yesterday.

‘‘We are mindful that it is a very important race day and we were less than 5050 to race on Saturday. We made the early call and we believe there is a 95100% chance we can race on Sunday.’’ — Additional reporting NZ Racing.