Island harness racing is heating up for the summer season. Red Shores at the Summerside Raceway is holding its first card of 2015 on Sunday at 1 p.m., while Red Shores at the Charlottetown Driving Park held its first Thursday evening program this week in addition to an 11-dash program Saturday at 6 p.m.
In an oddity for Island racing, the race office is battling a horse shortage in the entry box for this week’s two cards in Charlottetown.
Just 10 races were carded for Thursday's card with 75 horses competing while Saturday’s race program has 11 dashes with 80 entries. The Sunday afternoon opener in Summerside has 10 dashes with 68 horses. Of those 155 horses programed to race in Charlottetown, 12 of them are entered for both Thursday and Saturday race cards to help bolster the programs.
No doubt the hard winter has a lot to do with the supply problem, with country farm tracks still covered in snow just a few weeks ago, but a definite contributing factor is the Maritime Province’s Harness Racing Commission rule restricting the number of races a track can card in one program. Under the rule, any Maritime track can only hold 16 dashes a day, including pari-mutuel races and qualifers.
So last Saturday in Charlottetown, there were 12 pari-mutuel dashes leaving the track only allowed to card four qualifying races. With eight entries in a qualifier, that left only 32 horses with the capability to qualify themselves to race. Not to mention, those 32 spots were filled by last Monday, five days before the race card and four days before the entry box for qualifers technically closed.
The commission put the rule in place after race dates began getting tight in New Brunswick and Horse Racing New Brunswick was making sure every horse in the province that entered got an opportunity to race, resulting in more than 20 races on a card on occasions when stakes horses were in town, particularly in Fredericton.
With that strain on qualifying spots last week, there were 24 horses entered to qualify Thursday in Charlottetown, with more Saturday. Some of these horses were ready last week, and they would have been a welcome addition to the entry box. The rule wasn’t made to penalize horses trying to qualify in the spring, so the wording should be reviewed so it stops doing just that.
Maritime Scene
Northside Downs in North Sydney, N.S., is holding their first race card of the season Saturday afternoon while Inverness Raceway, also in Cape Breton, gets underway on June 14.
The New Brunswick racing season has been pushed back to a tentative start date of July 1, while Horse Racing New Brunswick deals with financial woes incurred during the 2014 season. The organization needs to get even on their purse payment debts to horsemen before they will be allowed to open for live racing in 2015.
Nicholas Oakes' column appears in The Guardian each Friday. He can be reachedat nicholasoakes@hotmail.com.
Nick’s Picks
Saturday at 6 p.m. at the CDP:
Race 1 – Lyndale Jenn
Race 2 – Jersey Joe
Race 3 – Eat Pray Trot
Race 4 – Unstoppable Speed
Race 5 – Chief Exec Officer
Race 6 – Supersonic Jet
Race 7 – Proven Desire
Race 8 – Van Zant
Race 9 – Fly With Max
Race 10 – Carnivore
Race 11 – Miracle Matts
Reprinted with permission of The Guardian