Swift was the easiest dog you could have wished for as a pet. We brought her home from Hastings at six-weeks-old and she wee’d in the kitchen on her first day and immediately house trained herself. She was fifteen-years-old and incontinent by the time it happened again.

Our other two whippets, sisters Moth and Cobweb, didn’t know what she was initially and refused to be in the same room as her for what seemed like days on end. Swift didn’t seem to care and just went about life in her happy-go-lucky way until they relented and became a little pack.

Swift was five-months old when she gave the first indication that she might live up to her breeding. She was off the lead with Moth and Cobweb and set off running circles playing hare to their greyhound. After a while they gave up because they couldn’t catch her, which was pretty impressive for such a young pup against two grown racing whippets, at least one of which was no slouch.

She remained quite playful with other dogs until she was well over a year old, which became a minor problem for a while. We’d race-trained her in the usual way, starting her behind a lure at about five-months-old and by nine-months-old she was doing the full length of the football pitch we trained on. Occasionally we timed the dogs and it was then that Swift did what you want all racing whippet pups to do, she showed, just the once, that she had brilliant speed. At nine-months-old or so she clocked a time that was good enough to make the final of an average open and better than anything Cobweb had ever achieved in her career. It was a hand-time and open to quite a margin of error because of that, but even allowing for that it was a good time.

Because we had Cobweb with whom to train Swift we didn’t bother racing her at the local club in Portsmouth before we took her to a puppy open. Her debut was at Worcester when she was approaching 11-months-old. There were two opens on consecutive days. Swift ran on the Saturday and the first time with strange dogs on a strange track she just lobbed up alongside the other dogs effortlessly keeping up. John Collins watched the race and immediately said she was a different class. The following day she showed that she was, winning the puppy open easily from the pup that had won the open the day before. Now we had something to go to war with and then the wheels fell off.

Pride comes before a fall and we were already proud of Swift so we took her down to Portsmouth for a bit of club racing to show her off. We decided to put her in a trial with Cobweb giving Cobweb half the start she would normally be getting in consideration of the fact that she was 7lb lighter than Swift so we could see Swift run past her. Swift trapped very badly and never looked like getting near Cobweb. So we tried again and it happened again. It was frustrating and disappointing both for us and for John Collins who had told everybody that she was the next “coming”.

Undaunted and just a little stupid I decided that we should take Swift to run in an open at Dawdon in the North East where she could run against the best pups “up north” having shown her wares already at Worcester. Dawdon was an unattractive place in those days. The shops we drove past on the way to the track all had metal grills protecting the windows and doors and the track itself was on what looked like reclaimed slag heaps a few hundred yards back from the sea. The beach, which you could see across the dunes from the track was blackened with coal. The place was grim, the weather was grim and the day itself ended up grim. Swift trapped terribly again, never got into contention and finished third of four. The winner was a pup from a north east litter that had cost a fraction of the money we had paid for Swift and one or two people were more than delighted to point it out.

On the way back south we decided to drop in at Lancaster Whippet Racing Club to give Swift a trial with Cobweb to reset our mood, but in the event that just made matters worse. The Lancaster crowd were a really nice bunch of people and let us set the race up as we wanted. Steve Bateson drove the lure for us and for once Swift trapped reasonably well, but that just allowed her to catch Cobweb and halfway up the track “tackle” her. Tackling or the intentional causing of interference to another dog when racing is what everybody hopes their pup will not do because if they do they are not allowed to race. Steve Bateson kindly said it was his fault because of the way he’d driven the lure and that she’d lost sight of it. It wasn’t and she hadn’t and we knew as much.

Thankfully, that was the only and last time Swift tackled. There are two types of tacklers, those that are immature and want to play with the other dogs more than they want to “kill” the lure and those that want to “kill” the lure so much that they become jealous of it and attack any dog that looks like they may take it off them. The former grow up, become keener to catch the lure and stop tackling, the latter are a devil to fix and often cannot be fixed.

Our confidence had been severely dented by the time she went to the puppy championships, which were run in torrential rain, but we still knew she had the talent to win supreme. As it turned out she trapped badly again and got knocked out in her heat. We went back to Old Hall where the puppy championships had been held and which was really the HQ of the sport at that time for some club racing to try to fix Swift’s trapping. It didn’t work. She gave yards away at the start in both races we ran her in there, but what she did during the race gave us hope for the future because she was clearly much quicker than the opposition once she got into her stride. She may have been flawed because of her trapping but she had brilliant speed. The future held great things for her and it is a tribute to how fast she was that throughout the whole of her three-season career almost all at the top level she was never once passed after the dogs left the traps.