With the coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) pan­dem­ic be­ing bein man­aged by the gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go, the ma­jor stake­hold­er in the Horse rac­ing fra­ter­ni­ty, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Rac­ing Au­thor­i­ty(TTRA), the Bet­ting Levy Board (BLB) and the Ari­ma Race Club(ARC) at a meet­ing held on Mon­day last agreed up­on a way for­ward for lo­cal horse rac­ing. The rac­ing plant at San­ta Rosa Park, Ari­ma was closed for rac­ing since March 14th. The ARC has pro­posed June 19 (Labour Day) for the re-start of the Sport of Kings lo­cal­ly. A date from the two of the three lead­ers in the lo­cal horse rac­ing scene agreed to be ad­e­quate.

How­ev­er, the re-start can on­ly com­mence with gov­ern­ment's per­mis­sion which has not yet been giv­en at the time of writ­ing this ar­ti­cle.

Here is the joint press re­lease from the three arms of rac­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing the ARC, the BLB and the T&TRA met on the 1 June 2020 to de­sign the restart of the in­dus­try with a race pro­gramme at San­ta Rosa Park race­course in Ari­ma.

The re­lease stat­ed that the meet­ing agreed that the live races will not have any spec­ta­tors dur­ing this up­com­ing time of tran­si­tion to a new nor­mal - we are hope­ful that this re­sump­tion will oc­cur on Fri­day 19th June 2020, sub­ject to the ap­proval from the Gov­ern­ment and the lo­cal au­thor­i­ties charged with the han­dling of the pan­dem­ic.

All Gov­ern­ment and Min­istry of Health Covid-19 pro­to­cols will be fol­lowed.

The re­lease con­tin­ued that the num­ber of per­son­nel re­quired on that race day will be ex­treme­ly lim­it­ed to the bare es­sen­tial con­cern­ing con­gre­gat­ing and the over­all safe­ty and wel­fare of the race­hors­es, grooms and jock­eys.

We look for­ward to the re­sump­tion of the lo­cal horse rac­ing in­dus­try as it means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple, ei­ther a form of much-need­ed em­ploy­ment or as an en­ter­tain­ment prod­uct for the fu­ture at­trac­tion of tourists and na­tion­als to San­ta Rosa Park in Ari­ma.

With the in­tend­ed June 19 re-start of the ARC, the Race­horse Own­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (ROA) Pres­i­dent, Vis­han Ali, has called on all stake­hold­ers- The TTRA, BLB, ARC, RTA and jock­eys to at­tend a meet­ing at the Grand­stand at 9:30 am on Sun­day, to dis­cuss the cut­ting stakes and stakes monies out­stand­ing.