Health & Safety

Just reading about noise issues, We did have similar problems when a Catford kennelhand  went to court claiming back injury from lifting dogs Into top kennels, it went court in Lewisham but was thrown out as they found that the  kennelhand would of been told the weight of the greyhound when it was weighed in and as such it was up to the kennelhand whether to lift it or not. Subsequently all GRA tracks had warning signs installed on how to lift correctly etc.
This nipped in the bud a possible landslide but always a danger with health and safety executives once you highlight an issue.
Simon Harris

Media Coverage

Thanks very much for the excellent coverage of the Derby competition this year. The new race result / replay integration is brilliant – the immutable progress of technology!

 

I recently stood as a candidate for the Owner Practitioner Director role for the GBGB. I managed the unusual permutation of 1. doing vastly better than expected and 2. being summarily thrashed by three far better candidates.

I don’t think I could have named six people who would have voted for me, let alone the 60 that did, for which I was genuinely rather taken aback and certainly very grateful. One of my central commitments in the election manifesto was to ensure the Derby result – and quotes from the winner owners – was carried by the BBC within the next three years.

This year, I failed. On the same day that “B-boy Breaking Championships: Who to look out for in London” featured on the homepage (it’s the name of the breakdancing world championships, presumably Strictly Dumb Dancing was already taken) our flagship event didn’t get a mention.

 

But as you’ll know, this wasn’t due to any sort of bizarre morality-driven editorial decision by the national broadcaster. In fact, the site editor was quite happy to talk to us about the possibility of both a news feature and to put us in touch with the streaming team. I wrote politely to Ian Singelton several weeks before the final, with a gentle follow-up a week later. That’s all it took, no PR team or coordinated lobbying.

I’m hesitant to publish correspondence so you were intentionally copied in for awareness. And we simply couldn’t get it over the line. I must be absolutely clear here – at no point were the BBC offered a stream of the Derby event by anyone in the correspondence chain. That’s certainly not my bride to give away.

The question was simply: is there any reason that a website with 700m+ views a month which carries the World Series of Baseball (steroid rounders), Kabbadi (no professional league in the UK) and Handball (also no professional league in the UK and you can actually apply to play for the national team through an online form) refuses to mention greyhound racing (a sport very much on the upward curve again)? There wasn’t. In fact, the Editor followed up with us several times to ask how we were progressing. It’s not fair to get into blame appropriation here – I’m sure there was a lot more I could have done to follow-up with decision makers – but it feels a missed opportunity.

I’m delighted that the Mickey’s Barrett  tale was picked up by regional press, it was tremendous, but if you hitch the story to a single dog in the competition, the impact is entirely contingent on a single factor.

A hosted stream that appeared “courtesy of Towcester et al.” would have been magical (Magico?), but even just a short two minute video of the build up + race + interview with winning owners has got to have been manageable. The offer was there.

 

I’ll stray into opinion here. If we get out day-to-day streaming tech and offering right, we won’t need the BBC in a few years’ time. We could so palpably become a global enterprise again. If a race goes off at 10:46 on a Monday, yes of course the UK viewership is going to be limited. But time zones dictate that the race is being broadcast at 18:46 in Japan – peak commuter time in a country with a strong tradition in animal sports (and analytical data in sports).

We don’t need to control the stream, but we could put all manner of advertising on the product side aimed at this market. I can’t even claim that big-brain idea for myself – it’s understood at the top of our governance structure. But I can say with some confidence that no-one has yet contacted the Market Access team in the Department for International Trade to see how this could be taken forward, or the responsible Minister.

There are whole teams of officials who could potentially help with this for the cost of the tax contributions you’ve already made. As shown above, what is the burden of one or two emails? They can only say no. There’s a question of who should take this forward – Ariadne would have long since have run out of thread trying to navigate greyhound governance structures – so just put a working group of us together and let’s take it forward.

 

In both examples, the core message is that people are happy to work with our sport. We’re not more sinned against than sinning. The question of our on-going viability is settled for this and the next parliamentary cycle (now that bit I did predict prior to the e-petition debate).  I failed this year with my own personal goal of seeing us mentioned on the BBC, but can we as a sport use the next year to be ready for 2023’s Derby? Yes, this letter is intended to put pressure on us all to get our act together – or, to surface the reasons why we’re actually quite happy to operate in a more limited viewership. But we absolutely can’t hide behind the fig leaf of being the animal sports Millwall – apparently, some people do like us, and we should care.

Alun Williams