The excitement of the jumps season at Musselburgh Racecourse got underway on 2 November with a bonus meeting on 14 November, to replace racing at Leicester cancelled because of firm ground. Sadly the racing on 24 November was abandoned following an inspection of the course the day before but there is a Christmas meeting on 14 December still to come. In short there is a real buzz at Musselburgh towards the end of 2016!
This has been a bumper year for the racecourse with the special excitement of a royal visit to mark their bicentenary too.
This is a longer season than normal with 11 meetings from November to the end of March. There will be prize money of just short of £750,000 available, and one new prize of £40,000 alone for The Edinburgh National run over four miles and designed for ‘stayers’ which will be part of The Scottish Cheltenham Trials weekend.
This new race is part of the weekend festival from 4-5 February 2017, all of which has delighted racecourse chief executive, Bill Farnsworth.
He told The Edinburgh Reporter : “We’ve steadily built up our Scottish Cheltenham Trials day in to what is now recognised across the sport as a genuine prep meeting for the Cheltenham Festival and it seemed the next step was to provide two days of quality jumps racing over a weekend.
“With just shy of £250,000 in prize money over the two days, we will have 10 races which are ideal preps for either Cheltenham or the Grand National, and we know from experience that racing fans love coming to Musselburgh for a glimpse of potential festival runners.”
From 1 January 2017 when there is a New Year’s Day fixture ITV will broadcast the racing from Musselburgh Racecourse for the first time for 27 years. But don’t stay home to watch if you live in Edinburgh – get on the bus and watch it from the stand or your own table in the hospitality suite.
There is also a further meeting on 3 January 2017 known as the Bank Holiday Raceday. The first race is at 1.00pm and the last at 3.30pm owing to the short January day.
All the details of tickets for New Year’s Day and all other race meetings are here.
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