What to Expect at aTrack Meeting

A greyhound track is all things to all men. You have the choice of sitting in a busy café, drinking tea from paper cups and watching the dogs racing on overhead televisions, to spending a couple of hours in a restaurant, being served your food by waiters and either watching overhead large screen televisions, or enjoying the usually excellent view of the track below while you dine.

Whatever your choice of area, and most racetracks offer them all, on entry every patron will receive a printed programme called a racecard. To understand the abbreviations see our link to the left. The card will contain descriptions of all the runners and reserves, along with details of their recent performances. The purpose of this is to give you as much information as possible in order for you to make an educated bet.

Typically a race is run every 15 minutes or so, and you can see the dogs as they are led from the paddock, and walked in front of the public enclosure, about ten minutes before the start of the race. Some gamblers like to check out a dog's anxiousness to be off at this stage and may consider a stressed, nervy dog has a higher chance of winning. This is, however, a personal opinion and is possibly not best viewed as an indicator of how well a dog will run.

From the public enclosure they are then placed into the starting traps, then the starter will check that muzzles and jackets are secure, and that, reasonably enough, all the dogs are facing in the right direction.

The hare… which the dogs are trained to chase… will start about half a circuit behind the traps, and once it reaches a set point will automatically trigger the traps to release the dogs. If a hare is caught by one of the dogs the race is void. From this point the first past the post is the winner. If the outcome is not obvious or cannot be decided by a judge, then a photograph, taken at the exact time the dogs pass the post, is examined - and a winner declared.