Dave Lee
The widely experienced Dave Lee is the latest recruit to the expanding Crayford training strength.
Currently at Harlow, Lee currently has a kennel strength of 44 racers, and had 38 runners at the Roydon Road venue last week.
He said: “It is a little more lucrative than Harlow but with everything going on in the media battle, I like the long term security of a bookmaker owned track. I also like the idea of kennels having the chance to not race at every meeting, but we have a lot of runners and I plan to race at all of them. We certainly have enough staff to cover it. The journey is around three quarters of an hour on a good run.
“I have 18 trialling tomorrow (Wednesday) plus more runners tonight. I’ll gradually move them over in the coming weeks so as not to cause any problems to Harlow.
“Apart from the runners, I also have a few unraced pups here who are due to grade in. We always enjoy having a litter or two and with Crayford prize money at the end of it, you can justify breeding a few. We certainly aren’t short of room, we operate from Graham Sharp’s old kennel, which at full capacity, had the room for 106 dogs.”
Richard Brankley, Head of Stadia commented; “Dave’s arrival will bolster the graded strength as we enter the Summer period. We are sitting with a healthy graded strength of just over 500 at the moment but based on previous years we could expect 40+ bitches to go off in season during the hot weather. We have reviewed the first 4 months of the 6 meetings per week schedule and feel now is the right time to make this addition.”
Racing Manager Danny Rayment added “Dave has been having open racers at Crayford for many years and they’ve always ran well here. He will be having quite a few triallers this coming Wednesday in addition to his 4 runners in the opens on Tuesday night (22nd) so I would anticipate he would make the transition by mid June with Harlow continuing to have his graded runners until then.
