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Pontefract’s Thursday afternoon card was abandoned after three races following an injury to jockey Duran Fentiman that left the track without enough ambulances to continue racing.
Fentiman fell from Tim Easterby’s Cangofar on the way to the start for the FBS Chartered Accountants Restricted Novice Stakes and sustained a suspected broken leg, causing a lengthy delay as he was treated in the ambulance and then taken to hospital.
The other horses set to run in the contest were held at the start for some time and it was eventually decided on veterinary advice that they should not compete after a long wait in the wet and cold conditions.
The incident coincided with a car accident on the road outside the track and after attempting to replace the absent ambulance in order to run the remainder of the card, it became apparent to officials at the course that they would not be able to do so in a suitable timeframe.
“Duran was unshipped on the way to the start and when the medical team got to him he obviously had quite a bad injury, they took quite a long time to assess everything, stabilise him and get him in the ambulance,” Norman Gundill, managing director of the track, told Racing TV.
“The ambulance has taken him the St James’s (hospital) in Leeds. There’s a further complication in that there’s been an accident on the road outside.
“All of the horses were kept at the start – it’s a miserable, cold, wet day. The stewards and officials were in communication with the vets at the start as to whether they were happy for the horses to run having been there for so long.
“There was an announcement saying that if any of the trainers wanted to withdraw their horses, they could do so.
“Under the rules, if an incident happens where one of the ambulances has to leave, then we can run one race but we can’t then carry on unless we get a replacement ambulance back.
“We were in a position to run one race, in the end what happened was that the vets decided the horses had been there for so long and as it was cold, it was not in their best interests to run.
“So far as the rest of the card is concerned, we made some enquiries to see if we could get a replacement ambulance, bearing in mind the timescale and when darkness will fall, the decision was taken that we couldn’t get one here, so we couldn’t carry on racing.
“Unfortunately we haven’t been able to run the race we should have been able to run, and we couldn’t run the rest of the card.”
