Chester Racecourse will continue to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ policy on bad behaviour ahead of this week’s May Festival.

Antisocial behaviour has crept into racecourses in recent years – notably at summer Saturday fixtures – and reared its ugly head again last weekend after a 50-man brawl broke out at Goodwood, which left four people hospitalised and has resulted in an investigation being opened by Sussex Police.

Ahead of Chester’s most high-profile three-day meeting of the summer, chief executive Richard Thomas issued a strong statement to any potential troublemakers, with an estimated 70,000 racegoers expected to visit the famous Roodee course this week.

“We have a very strong, zero tolerance policy on any antisocial behaviour and if they behave badly in any way, they’re thrown out,” Thomas told The Guardian, ahead of the three-day fixture which begins today (Wednesday).

“We have a big security presence. We turn away people who are drunk at the bars. No one is saying there aren’t drunk people at racecourses; of course, there are but you’ve just got to be on top of it all the time.

“We have a control room manned by all the emergency services and my team. We have a secondary control room down by the parade ring, which I’m at most of the time. We’ve got 76 cameras manned by operators, so if something happens we deal with it immediately. It’s vital because crowd safety is our number one priority. If we don’t have a licence, we don’t race. We take it seriously.

“It (bad behaviour) happens in every bar in every town but you’ve got to be one step ahead of it, you’ve got to see it developing. The two people who operate the cameras, they’re trained to operate cameras in busy stadia where things happens, so they get to spot these things very quickly.

“We’ve spent a lot of time with football clubs in the north-west, learning and developing our team. A lot of our team work at Manchester United and other places, they’re used to these big crowds and how they work.”