This year's In­ter­na­tion­al Great Race will go on as planned but the on­ly dif­fer­ence is that fans and sup­port­ers will have to en­joy it from the com­fort of their homes.

Mar­cus Gomez, pres­i­dent of the T&T Power­boat As­so­ci­a­tion said all ef­forts are be­ing made to stream event live on Au­gust 22, to avoid so­cial gath­er­ings which the Min­istry of Health and the gov­ern­ment have been ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens to stay away at home as far as pos­si­ble due to the coro­n­avirus (COVID19) pan­dem­ic which is hav­ing a dev­as­tat­ing ef­fect on all coun­tries around the globe.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia Sports on Wednes­day Gomez said: “Great Race is go­ing ahead as planned as a sport­ing event, with­out much con­tact or gath­er­ing, we are fol­low­ing all the COVID-19 pro­to­cols and guide­lines and we are mak­ing sure that all our race teams do the same and stay­ing safe.”

“The plan is to have the race and pro­mote our live-stream of the race. Spec­ta­tors can still view the race with­out hav­ing to go out or leave their homes. We are mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion very close­ly and we are putting all mea­sures in place to make sure that we op­er­ate safe­ly we keep every­one so­cial­ly dis­tanced with our brief­in­gs and so on.”

Last year En­er­giza pulled off a his­toric vic­to­ry in the 95mph Class, hold­ing off the larg­er and more su­pe­ri­or Mr So­lo Too in the 130mph A-Class cat­e­go­ry. De­spite Mr So­lo's over­all sec­ond-place fin­ish, they still en­tered the his­to­ry books for win­ning their class a record-break­ing 17th time.

Last year's

Be­tween 25 to 27 boats will take the starter's gun this year as reg­is­tra­tion was closed last week Thurs­day and an ad­di­tion­al grace pe­ri­od of one week, which is sup­posed to end to­day, was giv­en. Ac­cord­ing to Gomez: “Now it's full speed ahead, get­ting GPS wired in the boat so we can track them and so on, and that must hap­pen be­tween now and race day. I think every­body is very cau­tious right now, they are mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion very close­ly. It's not an easy time for us right now, fi­nan­cial­ly it has been tricky as well, we tried to give some breaks in the race sea­son to help that, but I think peo­ple are ex­cit­ed but they are still be­ing cau­tious with every­thing that's go­ing on.”