Good times bad times...

Greyhound Times

I’m a small stakes punter, not an expert; and I feel that is an advantage as I can approach this project in a very unconditioned way; I’m a punter writing for punters. Apart from knowing one trainer I have no access to the dog racing world so what I have learned I have had to glean a little knowledge from him; bless him! The sum of that knowledge is that: 0.08 sec is the figure used to calculate a length that a dog has finished in front of another. It is 0.06 sec in Ireland because they race over yards instead of metres. (It seems strange expressing the approximate length of a greyhound - 1.2metres- in speed terms of second /metre, but that is how it is cleverly done).

It actually fits very well with a calculation I often make; and I have used it to good effect. Let’s give you an example: I was at Peterborough races when Roxholme Girl ran - that good dog that went on to win the dog St Leger. The race was over 605 metres and she won in a good time of 37.49 sec. I used my calculator and punched in 37.49 secs and divided it by 605 metres this gave me a figure of 0.06168 metres/sec which I knew from charts I had made in advance that this was, ‘in my classification’ a 61/68 dog; and therefore worth betting again. Explanation: the /68 is the next two decimal places.

‘Why did I classify it as 61/68?’ It is not the usual way to refer to a dog’s speed!

The answer is that I had been dividing greyhound times in seconds by the length of the race in metres which gave me a reading of seconds/metre and I had built up a scale which I referred to, so that I could determine the quality of the run against other speeds (or pace) on the scale. This is how Roxholme Girl’s speed worked out to be 61/68:- 37.49sec divided by 605m = 0.06168 sec/m.

For convenience, so that I could simplify it to make a graph I dropped the first two numerals 0.0 off the front of the number making it 61.68 (it still represented 0.06168). You might say, ‘Why don’t you do what everyone else does and remember dog’s times and measure them against the track records as a guide?

The answer to that is: I was looking for a ‘universal’ way of comparing dogs time over various distances so that I had a comparison in Open Races where there is often a multitude of different track distances and times. The scale I came up with has a betting ‘Health Warning’ attached to it; because of the question of stamina and the various designs of tracks and the surfaces on them. So the scale can be useful to make a ‘sort of judgement’ but it can’t be considered as accurate in a way that I would like it to be because it would need some ‘weighting’ factors channelled into it.
But I try… and I find it useful.

This is the chart for dogs running over 200mtrs to 500mtrs (and in some cases - as you will see – more than those distances).
0.056 > 56 - record class
0.057 > 57 – record class
0.058 > 58 - record class
0.059 > 59 - cracking time
0.060 > 60 – very quick
0.061 > 61 - good time
0.062 > 62 - average to good
0.063 > 63 - average
0.064 > 64 - average to slow
0.065 > 65 – slow

Example of ‘class’on the above scale: Larkhill Joe held a European record of 27.95 for 480m at Monmore which = 27.95sec / 480m = 0.05822.A category 58 dog.

The actual race was run in 27.95 sec over 525 yards which = 27.95 /525= 0.05323sec /yd. ( because a yard is 3 inches shorter than a metre). Making it a category 53 dog over a distance in yards.

As races are run in Ireland, and in other countries, in yards it should be noted that a different scale would apply starting in the low 50s.

Come racing!!