By Michael Boriero
The Grand Prix Ski-Doo de Valcourt, which was set to take place from Feb. 11 to 13, has been cancelled due to the rapidly increasing COVID-19 cases throughout the province.
Guillaume Richard, the new general manager of the event, said when he came in on Dec. 6, everything seemed to be good to go. In November, everything was loose, he explained, they were going to run at full capacity, and they had kept the suites and VIP section.
“We kept it at 50 per cent in case it would regress, but it did regress a lot more than we expected […] and to make sure that we keep the Grand Prix alive for the future we could not afford to spend all that money to get prepared with the restrictions we have now,” he said.
As it stands, they’re only allowed 250 people outside, and according to Richard, the racers, teams and volunteers already push them over the maximum limit. It didn’t make much financial sense, he continued, although they did try, even going as far as setting up some of the tracks.
“We started to work on the track just before Christmas to put the ice down and it’s a lot of work because we have to put two feet deep of ice on the surface, so we can’t wait until two or three weeks prior to the race, and we have to make some snow […] it’s really expensive,” he said.
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