Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem July 6, 2026

Jason discusses the intense weekend weather and cancellations. 

A good Monday morning to you all! Hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend. It was positively roasting here in Virginia this weekend, hitting triple digit temps on Friday and Saturday and topping out at 95 on Sunday. Supposed to be down to the high 80s tomorrow, so back to just the normal basic kind of hot here! 

I wanted to write a little bit about the heat and cancellations in general. I feel like I saw lots of pontifications online about why tracks would cancel, or if they should have canceled or maybe they should have run and not been canceled. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but I’m always shocked at how many give opinions with zero idea of the actual circumstances of the situation they’re commenting on. 

One thing I know is that no track I’ve ever been at wants to cancel. Look, are there some days where the weather sucks, or maybe even something else in life just has you wanting to be home instead of at the track? Sure. But I’ve never had a boss at a track who showed up to the races hoping to cancel. Generally, the tracks want to do everything they can in order to run and operate a safe day at the races. Canceling results in not only losing out on the business from that day, but often paying many members of staff that day for the time they were out there with no income being produced. 

Also, you then have to make up the days or the races at different times and days than you normally would run, so it becomes annoying for everyone. We’re running today at Colonial, and believe me, I’d have rather had my normal day off! But we have to make up for Friday and Saturday’s cancellations last week, so we’ll run the next two Mondays to do that. 

Racing is an outdoor sport, and one luxury we do have is that we can run and will run in some forms of inclement weather. As long as it’s not too cold or hot or just a crazy wet storm, we can run – certainly an advantage over baseball or something like that. But we’re never going to be immune from the conditions. Even a very wet track is going to bring races off the turf and change things. 

One of the constant refrains I’ve heard a lot lately is “we never used to cancel like this before.” I saw someone tweet about how “we ran when it was in the 90s all the time back in the 90s.” I mean, we still run when it’s in the 90s now. Colonial hit triple digits both Friday and Saturday; that ain’t the 90s. 

Do we cancel more than we used to? Honestly, I’m not sure. It does seem like it to me, but I don’t know. However, I’d gauge that’s in part because maybe it wasn’t smart to run when it’s ungodly hot out. I don’t understand why being more cautious is always viewed as bad? It’s not like we’re canceling races when it’s 90 degrees outside. Even that is hot and uncomfortable for a lot of people who are working in it and fans who are attending, but things still go on. Temps at or above 100 is just a different beast, and doing hard work outside just isn’t the move, in my opinion. 

Cancellations will happen, and with HISA there’s kind of a protocol and heat index guideline now that kind of makes it more black and white of when to run and when not to. I’m no HISA cheerleader, but I do think it’s nice to have a line in the sand versus just having everyone debate on whether we can get the card in or not. 

Would welcome your guys’ opinion on X @beemieawards, and hope you have a great week.