Racing: Courses tune in to Santa Anita: Richard Edmondson on plans to beam in the Breeders' Cup

THE TENTH Breeders' Cup series will be screened live throughout Britain for the first time on 6 November.

Two racecourses - Doncaster and Newcastle - will stay open after racing to show the competition from Santa Anita, while Ascot, Goodwood, Newbury, Newmarket, Uttoxeter and possibly Hamilton, will also have the SIS pictures. The card will begin at 6.55pm (GMT) with the Sprint and conclude with the Classic at 10.30pm, and the gaps between races will be filled by comments from Richard Pitman.

Each course will also have betting facilities and, next year, it is hoped that British punters will be able to plop into the Tote pool from North America.

Officials at the Turf's world championships will react to complaints from animal- rights groups by introducing thorough checks on all participants.

This follows the fatal accidents to Go For Wand at Belmont and Mr Brooks at Gulfstream Park in recent years. 'The controversy about Mr Brooks has just not gone away and so we will be implementing rigid pre-race inspections,' James Bassett III, the president of Breeders' Cup Ltd, said yesterday. 'We will begin inspecting the horses on arrival in the sheds and observing them at least once under tack on the track and again on Breeders' Cup day. In all, we will probably look at them four times.

'We've analysed over 70,000 races and we came up with the conclusion that the accidents that we had at New York and Florida were unrelated.'

Another statistical survey will give heart to British trainers. A study of the weather at Santa Anita over the last 10 years has shown that the temperature in November is likely to be about 66 degrees with humidity of 55 per cent, compared to the oppressive 89 degree heat and almost 100 per cent humidity in Florida a year ago.