THIS YEAR’S PUNCHESTOWN Festival is in danger of becoming a washout, with heavy rain forecast throughout the week at the Kildare course.
Conditions are already described as soft, soft to heavy in places, with general manager Richie Galway hoping that the course gets the favourable end of the projected amounts.
“It’s going to be testing ground tomorrow and unfortunately, the weather has turned against us,” said Galway.
“We’ve had 30 millimetres of rain in the last week and 11 millimetres of that fell during Sunday.
“We’ve had another three millimetres so far today and the forecast is unpredictable, but very unsettled.
“We’re forecast heavy showers tomorrow. How much we’ll get is hard to say, but the MET Office’s best guess is five millimetres.
“Tuesday night through until Thursday night is again hard to gauge, but we could get anything between 20 and 50 millimetres.”
Galway was remaining non-committal on the subject of whether or not the festival could be curtailed.
“We’re obviously going to monitor things very closely,” he continued.
“I haven’t seen Punchestown have many problems for a long time, but the forecast is very unstable and we’re just going to have to see how much rain we actually get.
“We have fresh ground on the hurdle track, which is a big advantage and the chase track is wide enough that we can have fresh ground on that each day as well if needed.
“We’re just going to have to see what happens.”
