When the judges couldn’t split Aston Kane and Buck Forty in race 3 last night, they declared a rare dead heat. But just how rare is a dead heat at Sandown Park?
Since 1/1/96, there have been 28 dead heats in 21,925 races at Sandown Park, which is a remarkable figure in an age where times are recorded to the thousandths of a second. Last night’s dead heat was the first since 7/7/14, and the first on a Thursday night since 24/1/13.
The photo finish of last night’s dead heat
There have been 23 dead heats over the 515m distance since 1996 (from 18,672 races), but interestingly just four since 3/7/2007. When recent group 2 Launching Pad winner Buck Forty stormed home along the rail to make to hit the line with Aston Kane at the precise same moment – 29.664 seconds after the pair left the starting boxes – they became the fastest pair to record a dead heat.
Buck Forty and Aston Kane hit the line together
There has been four dead heats over 715m (from 1814 races) and just one dead heat (from 1325) races over 595m. By the numbers, dead heats are almost twice as likely in a staying event than a sprint, and around three times more likely than over the middle distance.
Just 12 of the 28 dead heats have occurred on Thursday night, with nine coming on Wednesday afternoons, three on Sundays, three on Mondays and one on a Tuesday.
Races five and six have provided five dead heats apiece, while race 10 is the only race in which there has never been a dead heat.
There have been some celebrated dead heats at Sandown Park. When celebrity greyhound Fred Basset made his much anticipated debut at Sandown Park on 12 October 2006, the judge couldn’t split Mintarka and Casual Lyrics. Fred Basset finished last.
But the most famous dead heat run at Sandown Park – and possibly in the sport of greyhound racing – came on the fourth of November, 1993. In torrential rain and broadcast on commercial television, Worth Backing and Golden Currency hit the line together in the first ever Topgun, a memorable finish in the inaugural running of one of the great races on the greyhound calendar.
DID YOU KNOW – Sandown Park was the first track of any code in Australia to install a photo finish camera, funded by the proceeds of a winning greyhound and sourced from surplus WWII materials! Click here to find out more about the photo finish system and how Sandown came to be the place where it was first installed.
The first ever Topgun, as called by the great Bill Collins
