Sydney Tracks Cop A Torrential Battering

New South Wales has copped an absolute pounding over the last two days and there’s barely a track in the state that’s managed to escape the heavy drenching.

Sydney took a direct hit and the wet weather has been relentless ensuring that the long run of slow and heavy tracks will continue into the foreseeable future.

Lindsay Murphy manages the four Sydney racecourses and says the rain has been relentless.

“It’s incredible, we’d had a reasonably dry spell of late but then the heavens have opened,” he said.

“Randwick has copped the most at the moment, 96mm (in 48 hours).”

The only plus is that the downpours didn’t arrive in their full fury until after racing had concluded on Saturday afternoon.

“We were very fortunate we got that meeting out of the way,” he said.

He says it was another blow to the track which was plagued by rain during the Autumn Carnival.

“It was recovering from the really wet carnival days, around the 800m and 700m area were quite worn,” he said.

Randwick coped the most rain but Canterbury wasn’t far behind with 80mm over the same period.

Making things worse is the fact Canterbury has less time to dry out with racing scheduled in just a couple of days time.

It has been benefitted though by a world class drainage system which has been working into overdrive.

“It’s an amazing track, because of the way it works you can see the drain working,” he said.

“It’s great, it feels better today after an extra  51m of rain then it did yesterday.

“It gets the drains really working, creates a vacuum effect.”

Rosehill had 76mm of rain recorded and like Canterbury it’s sitting on a Heavy 9 rating at the moment.

This weekend’s racing isn’t under threat however even if the skies were to clear the cool temperatures will mean any upgrade would only be marginal.

“Whatever happens we’ll be having a rain effected track come Saturday,” he said.

Warwick Farm faired the best of the Sydney tracks with 67mm of rain falling in the corresponding period.

It’s also not due to host another meeting until June 22nd so the race club has plenty of time to get things in order providing the rain eases in the next week or so.

“These rain periods are meant to ease off into the evening, it’s coming across off the coast in streams,” he said.

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