Sartai, Lithuania holds annual ice racing weekend

This weekend is the 108^th annual Sartai Trotting Dusetos in Lithuanian with their unique special ice racing events.

The city of Sartai welcomes tens of thousands of guests, not just from the city and Luthuanian, but from throughout Europe as horse lovers delight in making this year's event something special with breathtaking spectacular horse shows, and to promoters of the National Heritage Fair

Within the last two weeks the weather cooperated and the racetrack was well formed with snow melting and freezing to ice, satisfying the requirements of the races. The ice on the track is nearly 5 centimeters thick. 

There was a new Ford SUV Base mounted starting gate used this year. The starting gate has a deployable wingspan – 16 meters, and the same mechanism is made in Finland. This solution enables eight starters across, each of which has a 2-meter wide track start. 

There were a total of nine race held the first day, three of which were international events with a total of 61 trotters competing and many coming from Sweden, Finland, Norway, France and even Canada. 

By Steven Wolf, for Harnesslink with files from www.delfi.lt