The Lumsden Derby has been cancelled for this year due to COVID-19.

The event, which was going into it’s 33rd consecutive year, raises money for the local minor hockey association and sports complex

Event chair Jamie Lees said this was an extremely difficult decision to make.

“The biggest thing that it came down to was we wanted make sure that we had safety of all of the people that were going to be attending, safety of all of our volunteers; every single person on our committee is just a volunteer,”Lees said. “We talked about just doing a virtual event where we could just drop the ducks and people could see it online, but even just to drop the ducks, that means all of our volunteers have to come together to scan all of the ducks, to get all of the ducks in the actual cage.”

Lees said the virtual race also would have been difficult to do from a financial standpoint.

“There’s quite a few costs that go along with having the actual race, and we usually are able to recoup those costs when we have the actual event,” Lees said. “With no actual event, then it was a hard thing to be able to have enough funds to make anything a go.”

Lees said the money raised helps lower hockey registration fees by about $200 per player.

“They are already in talks for increasing fees for hockey for next year, and ice rentals, and things like that because they no longer have the Duck Derby to rely on,” Lees said. “They were also talking about being able to use the funds this year to do extra sanitization and bring in some other things to be able to help with them conquering COVID as well, and now they won’t have the funds for that.”

Those who have books of tickets to sell are being told to return them. Plans are in the works for a fundraising event on the Labour Day weekend, with proceeds going towards the 2021 Duck Derby. The event will only go ahead if given the ‘okay’ by the province.