As I sat and watched yet another trainer, namely Paul Harmes, (alongside Paul Burr, Kevin Proctor, Kevin Ferguson and Richard Wales already this year) bag their first category 1 winner with Kilwest Ranger on Saturday night, it filled me with a feeling of joy and optimism.
Now, that’s not me begrudging anyone else in that Laurels final of winning, but 17 weeks, or a third of the way through the season as we are at this point, has yielded 16 different category 1 winning trainers. That’s quite remarkable considering the price of top class dogs this side and the other side of the water is only rising.
Given that then, you could be forgiven for thinking in today’s game that the “big” owners should be dominating more than ever. Though clearly they’re not, for now anyway. At this point in 2022 we saw only 10 different winning trainers, and although that rose to 13 in 2023, that’s still obviously short of where we are currently. Variety is the spice of life, they say!
One team that you could argue are the closest to dominating, is the Liz McNair trained, KSS Syndicate owned, team of Kings and Queens. They still remain the only ones to have doubled up their winners, and by doubled up I mean they’ve actually won 4! It’s a remarkable start and it’s hard to see it stopping for the rest of the year. Perhaps even more remarkable is their focus on a ‘built not bought’ foundation of dogs. Built not bought was a saying often heard around the stock car tracks. It effectively means “anybody can go out and buy a ready made race car, but can you build your own and be on the pace with it?”. The expression can be transferred to greyhounds. Anybody with an endless pot of cash can attempt to buy the best on offer, even then it’s still hard, but can you breed them yourself and still compete at the top? I think it’s amazing the level of dog that they produce year on year, and I’ve a serious admiration for that.
Back to the original point of this article though, and I remain optimistic for the rest of the year that we can see yet more trainers hit the category 1 winners list, and even better, maybe a few more newbies finding their way onto the roll of honour for the first time. There’s still a place in this sport for new owners to join and compete at a reasonable cost, and there’s still a place for ‘one man and his dog’ to compete and win at the top. Remind me again, why did we do away with the owner/trainer license?
Until next time.
