Ageless veteran Duce Royal will be aiming for three straight wins in Saturday night’s City Of Casey Sprint (311m) at 7.40pm.
The feature event is one of the highlights of Cranbourne’s annual Tricode race meeting, with a quality field chasing the $5,000 first prize.
Trainer Ben George said the race into the first bend would be vital.
“The obvious dangers look to be Untold Soldier and Fully Loaded, but there’s so much early speed in this race that anything could happen. They’ll be travelling at about 66kph in the early stages,” George said.
Duce Royal is drawn in Box 2 tonight, a draw he has won from on three occasions.
“His last two wins have been from Box 7 and I would have preferred him drawn out wide again to be honest.”
“He tends to step right in his first couple of steps because he likes to sweep around the first bend, but what gives me some confidence about him is that he has run really quick time at Cranbourne before,” George said.
Duce Royal boasts a sensational personal best time of 17.54sec at Cranbourne, just 2.5 lengths off the track record, and George believes that he is still capable of running that sort of time.
“He’s four-and-a-half years old now but I believe he is running as fast as ever. I keep him lightly raced and basically let him tell me when he wants to race,” he said.
“He’s a lazy dog by nature, and if he shows me that he doesn’t want to exercise I won’t push him.”
“He has only had 42 starts (16 wins), which isn’t a lot given his age.”
George and his partner Tara departed their houseblock in Brisbane two years ago, leaving behind friends and family to purchase a 10-acre property in the Gippsland town of Nerrena.
“We decided to chase our dream of becoming full-time greyhound participants and it has been a challenge setting up our property from scratch. But we’ve got Duce Royal and Kilpatrick who are both pretty handy greyhounds, and we’ve got a few youngsters coming through as well,” he said.
The Tricodes event will incorporate 24 races across all three codes from 6.10pm tomorrow.
