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As in all sports, when a record is broken it is worthy of note.
At Crayford, we race over five different distances and when you combine both flat and hurdles, we have eight current track record times in place.
Our sprint distance of 380m had a track record of 22.97sec held jointly by Tictac Tyson and You Never Listen, from May 2011 and February 2015 respectively.
You could count on one hand the number of greyhounds that have gone under the 23sec barrier for 380m, so when you consider that across all distances, we have something in the region of 20,500 runners in a year, across our 260 race meetings, when any record goes a new landmark has been achieved.
During last Saturday evening’s meeting, Target Harris, trained by Hayley Keightley, flew home in a 380m open race in 22.88 thus reducing the track record time by one-and-a-half lengths.
Target Harris is a class act having won 14 of his 29 career races. In addition to now going into our record books as the new sprint king, the dog also has two other previous track records to his name at Nottingham, over 305m and Hove over 285m.
Given his record, his starting price here on Saturday night of 4/6 favourite looked good value.
The dog may well reappear here in the future, so make a note and come down and see one of the fastest around.
While we all like a home win here, we do have a lot of visiting dogs trained by non-Crayford trainers who take part in our open races. Many simply seem to love competing and notch up a series of wins.
One such individual is Westmead Lola, trained by Wayne Wrighting at Hove. Lola registered her sixth consecutive win at Crayford last weekend.
This was the greyhound’s 11th victory in her last 13 races at various venues, so while she has clearly been in good form, it is still some feat to come to Crayford and win six times on the bounce.
Her victory here was in a heat of the Ladbrokes.com Summer 540m event and she will be returning for the all-important final on Saturday.
I would not put it past her to make it seven out of seven wins – an amazing performance.