KUALA LUMPUR,  25 April 2008

The Selangor Turf Club (SLTC) will host its first cross-border races (CBR) in June after a lapse of nine years.

On the first weekend of the Piala Emas Sultan Selangor Meeting on June 7 and 8, SLTC will stage two CBR or Open Races for Class 1 and Class 3 horses over 1200m with stakes of RM340,000 and RM200,000 respectively.

On the second weekend (June 14 and 15), the RM1m Piala Emas Sultan Selangor (1600m) will be open to Singapore entries and the club will also stage another CBR race for Class 4 horses over 1600m with prizemoney of RM150,000.

After the final declaration, in the event of insufficient Singapore entries for the Open Races except the Piala Emas Sultan Selangor, the SLTC committee has the right to cancel the Open Race status and declare the race to be run as a normal Malaysian race.

This forthcoming staging of CBR races at Sungei Besi is made possible with the completion of an isolation complex which has 16 stables. The complex is more than 100m away from the local stables at Sungei Besi as required by the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore.

Malaysia and Singapore went separate ways as a result of the virus outbreak in 1999 when a ban on the movement of horses across borders was imposed.

The Penang Turf Club is the first to re-introduce cross-border races in 2005. Since then, Singapore trained horses have won the RM1.35m Yang Di Pertua Negeri Gold Cup twice: LIGHT OF SUCCESS in 2005 and EXPUNGE in 2006.