Great news for greyhound trainers as race schedule benefits Gunnedah

Greyhound Racing NSW released a revised racing schedule on Saturday in which four meetings were allocated to the Gunnedah Greyhound Racing Club from Monday, April 27, to Tuesday, May 26.

All four of those will be twilight meetings held on consecutive Wednesdays, the first of which will be on Wednesday, April 29.

“Greyhound Racing NSW has today (Saturday) released the new racing schedule for the next four weeks in relation to the regional zoning which was introduced late last month, following the outbreak of COVID-19,” a GRNSW statement read.

“GRNSW has worked in collaboration with the Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission to facilitate a new calendar which has additional meetings in all regions.

“The New England region will have a weekly race meeting now with Gunnedah racing every Wednesday.

“With this new schedule now in place, the GRNSW grading department will complete programming for each of the meetings.”

GRNSW then announced on Monday which meetings would carry additional prizemoney, and which meetings would be restricted to specific grades of greyhounds.

The additional prizemoney is being allocated from the budgets normally used for Wednesday meetings at Wentworth Park, for races 421m and over, and sees NG race for $3,000 to the winner, fourth grade $2,800 to the winner, and fifth grade $2,500 to the winner.

One of the meetings that has benefited is the Gunnedah meet on Wednesday, May 20.

Wee Waa greyhound racing trainer Geoffrey Whitton welcomed the latest announcements and said that he would be nominating his dogs for all four of those Gunnedah meetings.

Whitton told The Courier that GRNWS had done a great job in tricky circumstances.

“They were only having one a fortnight in Gunnedah before so this is real good now,” Whitton said.

“They are all TAB class races so prizemoney has gone through the roof.

“It all depends what grade of dog they are but some of them are now $2800 for a win.

“But they still have some races that are solely for the real lower grade dogs that only race at the country tracks.

“There’s not much else [GRNSW] can do, they’ve done a great job with it all through this COVID thing, they’ve done an excellent job.

“We still have to observe all the restrictions and everything, like the metre-and-a-half rule and obviously there’s no crowds and no TAB there.

“Also they take your temperature as you walk in and if they hear you coughing they send you straight home. And now when we load the dogs in the starting boxes they only do two at a time.”