There will be no elite sport in the UK until at least June 1st. This sport will more than likely be behind closed doors with no spectators in attendance.
The UK government on Monday released a roadmap on what they intend to do over the coming weeks, in terms of what activities can be carried out. In regards to sport in the UK, this falls under step 2 in their road map. It states that sports can return on June 1st but must be behind closed. It says, “Permitting cultural and sporting events to take place behind closed-doors for broadcast, while avoiding the risk of large-scale social contact”.
The document states that cinemas and venues can re-open in step three, which is no earlier than July 4th. It states, “Some venues which are, by design, crowded and where it may prove difficult to enact distancing may still not be able to reopen safely at this point, or may be able to open safely only in part”. All of this information is available in the document entitled Our Plan to Rebuild: The UK Government’s Covid-19 Recovery Strategy’.
The document does state that the opening of venues, such as sports stadiums “will be only be fully possible significantly later depending on the reduction in numbers of infections”.
It looks certain now that the various organisations will hold meetings to discuss their next plans of action and when to get sports going from June onwards. Football has been out on the back burner in the UK for nearly two months now (March 13th). However, we reported last month that the Premier league are looking to return to complete the 92 games in June.
Horse Racing in the UK could also return in June. Horse racing stopped in the UK on March 17th. The news came from the British Racing Authority twitter account where they tweeted, “Industry leaders are meeting to discuss the available information and will issue an initial response later today”.
The first horse racing events which could possibly fall under the June opening of venues will be the 1000 guineas and 2000 guineas as Newmarket. Whether they will. Go ahead or not is another question. Obviously things will have to stop, ie the slow of the spread of the virus to allow this to happen. However, we are still looking at no sport until June 1st at the earliest.
Video – Sky Sports Football
