Awards end top carnival
Horsham Greyhound Club wound up a successful carnival with a community grants presentation night.
The club also announced its 2021 annual award winners at the event.
Each year the club allocates trainers points on a sliding scale system when one of their greyhounds finishes first, second or third in a race at the Horsham track.
As a result, this year Andrea Gurry from Nhill became ‘Local Horsham Trainer of the Year’ and overall ‘Horsham Trainer of the Year’ for 2021.
In previous years, large Melbourne kennels usually won trainer of the year.
Andrea trained 40 winners for the year, actually less than second-placed Garry George of Beulah – with Garry training a massive 47 winners for the 2021 calendar year.
Garry’s results would normally secure trainer-of-the-year honours, but Andrea had a large amount of other runners finishing second and third, which in-turn boosted her total points for the year to 355.5. Garry finished on 317.
Garry, however, won a 2021 local achievement award for training the most winners in a calendar year by a local trainer. The most in the club’s history to date.
As a result he finished with a strike rate of greater than 30 percent, almost double the industry average.
Andrea finished the award ceremony as she started; with her Greyhound Fearless Pigeon awarded the 2021 Horsham Greyhound of The Year.
‘Pigeon’ finished with a 2021 Horsham race record of seven wins, six seconds and four thirds.
Both Andrea and Garry train teams of no more than 12 racing dogs at one time and travel many kilometres to race and trial their dogs at multiple tracks across Victoria.
On a side note, now that the carnival has come to an end and our regular Tuesday racing slot is back, bingo has started again every Friday at the club and kicks off at 1pm. Feel free to come on down. The more the merrier.