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SCHEDULED jump racing will return to Royal Windsor Racecourse for the 2024/25 season after an absence of more than 25 years.
It is anticipated the first national hunt meeting will be on Sunday December 15, 2024 and Royal Windsor will host a small number of National Hunt fixtures across the 2024/25 season.
On confirmation of the 2025 fixture list, a further number of jumps fixtures will be confirmed for the winter months, ahead the start of the flat season. It is anticipated that there will be no net increase in the number of fixtures over the year at Windsor. The new jump fixtures are likely to replace the afternoon flat meetings that have been traditionally held at the beginning and end of the season in both April and October.
Mark Spincer, managing director of Arena Racing Company’s (ARC) racing division, said: “We have long held a desire to bring jump racing back to Royal Windsor Racecourse and we are really pleased to confirm this plan well ahead of the planned first fixture in December 2024.”
“Whilst the Racecourse hasn’t hosted regularly scheduled jumps fixtures since 1998, we believe that the plans that we have put together with BHA will mean that the small number of fixtures that we would like to host will sit well alongside the long established, popular summer flat programme.”
“A significant amount of work has gone into considering the optimal layout for jump racing at Royal Windsor, which will see the course configured differently to how it was previously, but we believe that it is an excellent proposal to offer jump racing fans the chance to come back to Royal Windsor, whilst not impacting on the flat programme, which is an important consideration.”
“The proximity to the River Thames gives the track excellent drainage, and our records show that the racecourse very rarely ran jumps fixtures on heavy ground, with the majority of abandonments coming due to frost. Happily, turf management techniques have developed significantly since that time, so we are confident of providing excellent jumping ground for the fixtures that we would like to host in 2024 and 2025 and beyond.”
Royal Windsor has a history of hosting jump racing, staging regular national hunt meetings until 1998. In the intervening years Windsor temporarily hosted a handful of fixtures on behalf of Ascot Racecourse during the latter’s redevelopment in 2004 and 2005.
The newly configured jumps course will utilise previously dormant turfed areas of the site and the new configuration of parts of the track now see runners take a continuous left-handed circuit, instead of the previous figure-of-eight. To facilitate this, number of areas of the track, including the back straight, will be widened to allow adequate space for both hurdle and steeplechase races.
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