Sports
The town is home to many major sports including cricket and football. Its two most famous institutions are horse racing at Pontefract Racecourse and Featherstone Rovers, the area's professional rugby league club.
Pontefract Racecourse is the longest continuous circuit in Europe at two miles and 125 yards (3,300 m). It stages flat racing between the end of March and the end of October. Nearer to the town centre are the Valley Gardens, with a love garden, an aviary, and an avenue of cherry trees, which bloom in the spring. Although the trees continue to attract admiration, the gardens have become quite depleted and the aviary has been vandalised. Pontefract swimming pool is on Stuart Road.
Pontefract has its own non league football club Pontefract Collieries F.C. who were founded in 1958 and play adjacent to the former Prince of Wales Colliery off Beechnut Lane. "Ponte Colls" play in the Northern Counties East Football League
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Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
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Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
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