It’s unusual to see a Free For All over 715m at Sandown.
In fact, it’s been 7128 days since a Free For All over 715m has been run at Sandown Park, a drought that comes to an end tonight when six top grade stayers meet in the fourth event of the card.
Thursday 19 October 2000 was the last a Free For All was run over the ‘half-mile’, won by Valley Cowgirl by 6.5 lengths in 42.49, which was pretty quick on the old Sandown track (Osti’s Joker won the Sandown Cup six months earlier in a then race record 42.26). Peter Giles trained the winner, in fact, he trained the first 4 over the line.
Since, the club has run 20,504 races over 1804 meetings, of which 1395 of them have been 715m races. And while the club did run a mixed 3/4 event over the trip in October 2014 which could be considered a Free For All (as well as 443 races with a ‘special event’ tag), race 4 tonight is the first to be graded as a FFA. Free For All.
That’s an awful long time between Free For Alls. Back when that last FFA was run:
• Go Wild Teddy was just weeks away from pocketing the $100,000 first prize for winning the Melbourne Cup
• The Dish was the number 1 movie at the box office
• On A Night Like This topped the charts for Kylie Minougue
• John Howard was Prime Minister
• Steve Waugh was captain of the Australian Test team
• Wikipedia was three months from launching
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – even MySpace – didn’t exist.
The word was a different place in 2000. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 20 years before our next 715m FFA.
Group 1 winner True Detective is the favourite for tonight’s event, and we can expect to see many of these greyhound to continue on to the RSN Sandown Cup in May.
Tonight is a night for long running streaks to end – Matt Lanigan will break a run of 65 consecutive metro Sandown races without a red box when Vivatar jumps from box 1 in race 9 tonight.
TGIF!
Click here for your free Watchdog form guide
Click here for the latest market from tab.com.au
