Have a go
Race night: pick a trap and get her round
Choose your trap. When the gates go, your reaction is her break. Then watch the race run — inside traps are favoured on the bends, the field bunches at the first turn, and a bad break is hard to get back.
Why the traps decide so much
A greyhound is through the gate and into its first stride in about a sixth of a second. It is not really reaction in the way we mean it — by the time the gates move she is already loaded against them, watching the hare, with every muscle wound up and nowhere to go.
The draw matters because of the first bend. Six dogs arrive at it together, the inside ones have the shortest line, and anything that is squeezed loses lengths it will spend the rest of the race trying to recover. On a tight track like Romford, most of the race is decided in the first forty metres.
So if yours got checked at the bend above — that is not the game being unfair. That is racing, and it is why a trainer thinks about the draw before anything else.
