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Looks like Doncaster and Sedgefield are taking on the races from Towcester.
The curious thing is that seven of the eight they have sold were their highest attended meetings in 2013.
Suicide to sell your highest attended meetings or a hope that people will now attend the rest and bolster attendances?
Yes, that was my thinking too. Saturdays, Sundays and Boxing Day all gone. Weird. And 156 dog meetings – the novelty will keep them going for a while but at that rate of meetings I think it’ll soon wear off.
Friday and Saturday are the days they plan to run the greyhound meetings, which is why those are the fixtures they have sold.
Very worrying news as I can’t see this as anything other than detrimental to the future of racing at Towcester. I can only hope that this is a temporary measure and meetings will increase in the future.
The only positive is that Doncaster’s underused jumps track looks like picking up some extra meetings.
Why don’t Towcester try a mixed meeting with dog and horse races on at 20 minute intervals. It might work as a novelty.
Did anyone see the interview with Towcester’s chief exec on the Sunday forum?
He didn’t really convince with regards to the horse racing future. I can understand his reasoning for the move to so many greyhound meetings but Towcester should be a horse track first and foremost.
Why the interest in Towcester in particular? Couldn’t operators in the Far East use an existing dogtrack/tracks in the UK, thus negating the need to butcher the existing program at a venue with no previous history of dog racing in the first place.
has anyone said exactly which bits of ‘the Far East’ are involved?
not mentioned in the quotes i’ve seen, eg:
"The plan will be for Towcester greyhound racing to beamed internationally, to Australia, South America and all across Europe," Mr Ackerman said.
Wit,
The places specifically mentioned to me were Singapore and Sri Lanka, as well as Australia.
thanks Alan.
didn’t think the casinos in either Singapore or Colombo ran any sportsbooks, just table games and slots, but there we go….
the SCMP did a piece last year on the 50th anniversary of the Macau canidrome.
sub-headed: Amid criticism from animal activists and falling revenue, Asia’s only racetrack for greyhounds is worlds away from Macau’s glitzy casinos, it included this:
>>…The crowd is small, no more than 50 or 60 throughout the whole night. They are mainly tourists, easily identifiable by their bags of Macanese shortbread, peanut candy and low-cost cosmetics. A young couple from Guangzhou are there because the track is famous and they don’t have one at home.
Bernice, a public relations worker from Singapore, sits minding bags of souvenirs while her husband goes off to bet, smoke, and bet again. They come to Macau quite often, but this is only the second time they’ve come to the canidrome.
"We don’t have anything like this in Singapore", she says. "I think probably the SPCA wouldn’t allow it. I’ve heard it might close down very soon."….<<
Fairly sure Sri Lanka is one of the places that gets horse racing pictures from the UK for their betting establishments.
I met a few Sri Lankans when I worked in Kuwait and they were as mad keen on gambling as any group. They played some exotic card game that none of us could follow, but plenty of cash was changing hands.
There’s some info about the current betting regime here:
interesting site, Alan, thanks.
Singapore domestically has its Turf Club for horses and its sole bookie Singapore Pools for football and Formula 1 – although its not illegal to use foreign online bookies.
but seems there’s more of a history of dog-betting from Sri Lanka than from Singapore.
still looks ambitious of Towcester though to chase dog-racing when that sport seems pretty much in decline in various former strongholds around the world…..
Info now on the Towcester website (I was looking to see if next weeks meeting is free admission – it is), that the first greyhound meeting will take place in December and will be shown on Sky.
Another snippet I’ve picked up is that for every position they advertised for a contract trainer, they had twenty applications.
Don’t know if that’s an indication of the appeal of Towcester or a sign of desperation to escape from their current tracks.
An update on the dog racing at Towcester – they are now racing every Friday and Saturday evening, with an extra meeting on Thursday that provides more open races. The Thursday cards will be switched to Sunday afternoons next month.
At the latest Saturday evening meeting, staged in freezing conditions, they filled the restaurant and hospitality boxes and had a further 2,100 punters taking advantage of free admission.
It will be interesting to compare that with the crowd figures for the horse race meeting that took place yesterday.
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