This week's lifting of sporting crowd capacities would have been too late even if it came last week to enable the running of Maitland's group 3 Inter City Pace series.
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The time-honoured series has been postponed until March-April, with the crowd size just one part of the decision, Maitland Harness Racing Club honorary secretary Wayne Smith said.
The series has traditionally been held in late December and early January but the Maitland Harness Racing Club, in consultation with Harness Racing NSW, have changed the schedule because of COVID restrictions on crowds and potential short-term drops in prizemoney due to the pandemic's impact.
The December 20 and 27 race dates set aside for the heats and final have been transferred to Newcastle, which will hold standard meetings.
A swap of race dates, likely in late March and early April, will allow Maitland to run their feature programs with greater certainty.
Smith said an internal assessment of the Maitland Paceway indicated a maximum of only 500 people would be allowed at each meeting under COVID restrictions.
"That's obviously changed now but a call needed to be made and, even with the lift in numbers, restrictions on the serving of alcohol and the like would have made it problematic to proceed," he said.
"We left the call as late as we could, but even if the restrictions on numbers had been lifted last week it would have probably been too late to get everything together.
"We opted to postpone things to late March, early April to ensure as normal a running as possible of what is our most important event, even if 'normal' doesn't apply any more in 2020."
The series' conditions have also changed. The races were restricted to Australian-bred pacers in recent years, but imports will again be allowed to compete.
However, they must be trained in NSW for at least 28 days before the close of nominations. They must also have had their last four starts in NSW, unless trained in the state for the past 12 months. The grading system of the series may also change.