Bangalore races from Saturday

By Our Correspondent

Bangalore, May 15: The re-scheduled 26 day programme of the Bangalore summers season is set to start on Saturday (May 17, 2008) and will conclude on Friday (August 8, 2008). All the races will be held on Saturdays and Sundays except the last two weeks. Concurrently, summer races will be held at Mysore for 16 days from May 21 to July 23, 2008.

Fifty seven trainers, including two from Mumbai, eight from Hyderabad (L. D’ Silva, Ananth Vatsalya, LVR. Deshmukh, D. Netto, Prasad Raju, Shezad Abbas, Laxman Singh and Shamsuddin) and a lone professional from Calcutta, are expected to participate during the season.

Pursuant to the recommendation at the International Racing Conference at Paris, regarding the increased physical weight of jockeys, the minimum riding weight of the rider has been raised from 47 kgs to 50 kgs.

Consequently, the rating system has been reconstructed. Now horses rated 80 and above will remain as it is, while 60-90 will be 60-85, 40-70 will be 40-65, 20-50 will be 20-45 and 00-30 will be 00-25.

As a result the band of weights in a race will now be from 50 to 62.5 kgs (difference of 12.5 kgs) as compared to 47 kgs and 62 kgs (difference of 15 kgs). Rating of horses has been dropped uniformly by six points after the conclusion of Bangalore Winter Meeting 2007-2008 and the scales of weights has been compressed to 60 kgs.

Consequently rating of un-raced horses has also been revised to 28 from 34 for colts, gelding and horses and to 25 from 31 for fillies and mares. Allowance to apprentice jockeys and those below 25 years has been reduced to 4 kgs from 5 kgs. The jockeys will now be entitled to claim an allowance of 4 kgs up to riding 10 winners, 3 kgs upto 20 winners, 2 kgs upto 30 winners and one kg till he/she completes 40 winners.

The stakes for Kingfisher Derby Bangalore has been increased to Rs 1.05 crore including the clubs contribution of Rs 30 lakh.