It says a lot about the optimism of youth that despite Cobweb’s horrific injury to her chest we never for one moment thought we wouldn’t be back racing as soon as the season resumed in earnest in the spring.

I look back thirty plus years to that time and think how we fret now about one of the dogs getting the most minor of injuries and how that might affect their potential and long for the carefree attitude we had then. To be fair, we do seem to live in a more judgemental world, perhaps created by the accessibility to everyone’s business on social media. In the age when we raced Cobweb nobody judged how we raised our dogs or what we used them for. Cobweb’s breeders, nice people that they were, never spoke to us again after we’d taken her home at six weeks old and the advice we received from seasoned whippet racers was constructive, useful in the main and offered only when we asked for it.

Cobweb’s two-year-old campaign ended up being our best year whippet racing up to that point. Perhaps the most memorable highlight was our rather disingenuous visit to Wokingham Whippets with her.

My brother, who lived near Wokingham and had been to watch the whippets racing at the football ground after matches on Saturday evenings, and I decided to take Cobweb to see if they’d let her race. Now Cobweb wasn’t the best racing whippet there had ever been, but she was a racing whippet bred for the job from generations of dogs used for that purpose by miners and the like in Britain’s industrial heartlands. Her ancestors had been bred to win money racing. The dogs racing at Wokingham Whippets were a rag-tag bunch of pedigree whippets, some used for rabbiting and some just pets that raced on a Saturday night. I knew from the winning times published in Whippet News that the times pedigree racing whippets were running in comparison to those true racing whippets like Cobweb were running were like chalk and cheese. The biggest, fastest pedigree whippet in the country wouldn’t have been able to hold a candle to Cobweb in a race.

I was shocked when they agreed to let her run and more so when they gave her a handicap mark in the middle of pack in her race. I told my brother that she was a racing certainty and that despite the fact she’d never run under lights or around a makeshift bend on a football field. She had run on bends at greyhound tracks and would follow a lure off the end of the earth and I knew she would have speed to burn against the opposition.

My brother was all for having a very unsociable bet, but I reined him in so as not to get us in too much trouble and we had a tenner each at 3/1. In the gloom, Cobweb didn’t see the lure as it came past the traps and came out last about five yards behind all the other dogs. My brother was crestfallen, but I told him it would be ok, at which point she carved through the other dogs like a knife through butter. By the bend she was about five lengths clear, but was not expecting the lure to turn left and ended up running right around the outside of the bend. The other dogs knew the score of course and shot up the inside past her. At the entrance to the home straight she was about third of five a few lengths off the leader. I reassured my brother that it would be ok and it was as she shot past them all on the run for home to win by three or four lengths.

We collected our winnings and very kindly they offered to let her run again in a later race off a new more difficult mark, giving the other dogs start. I agreed and despite having been put back six or seven yards told my brother that we should back her again because this time she would know what she was doing. She did exactly what I’d expected and ran the next race as if she’d been around the track a hundred times and won by a country mile. That win was probably her finest hour, but there were other highlights that year.

In gratitude for all the help we’d received from the members at the Portsmouth club we put up a few hundred pounds of prize-money for their open and got a bit of sponsorship through our contacts in greyhound racing. It is perhaps slightly regretful that some of the members saw it as easy money if they ran the open in as many different weight-classes as was necessary for their dogs to pick up the money we’d put up, but not everyone is always as honourable as they might be. Unfortunately for Cobweb she had to face Swift Ellie, the best dog in the country in her weight-class and the very useful yearling DOT who went on to be racing champion herself. DOT and Cobweb succumbed to Ellie who went on to win the open outright while they went into a consolation event for all the dogs beaten in their heats. The pair ended up dead-heating twice in the consolation final. A horse racing friend of ours who was stood on the finishing line was adamant Cobweb had won the second of the two dead-heats, but we were happy to share the winnings with Steve Rowell who owned DOT and had helped us a lot with the dogs. They had been hard fought, tight races and were what whippet racing was and always will be about for us.

Cobweb had a bigger near miss at the BWRA Championships, the grand daddy of whippet racing events. Again she faced Swift Ellie in her weight-class along with a whole host of very good 18lb bitches including a rival she traded blows with throughout her career called It’s Rosie. Normally Ellie was three yards or so better than Cobweb and It’s Rosie but her form had really tailed off and It’s Rosie beat her in her heat. Ellie went through to the weight-class semi-final because first and second go forwards to the next round at the BWRA Championships, but she no longer seemed invincible. Cobweb was second in her heat as well, but then won her semi-final beating both It’s Rosie and the dog that had beaten her in her heat, Swift Ellie scraped home in the other semi. To my mind that made us favourite for the final, Rosie having beaten Ellie earlier in the day, Ellie having beaten the fourth member of the final in her semi and Cobweb having beaten Rosie. If Cobweb had won her weight-class final she would have become a racing champion (RCh), but it wasn’t to be. For the only time in her life she stumbled leaving the traps and had no chance of recovering the ground. Ellie went on to win narrowly from It’s Rosie and we finished last. Sometimes you can try too hard. It may be rose-tinted spectacles, but the video really does look like Cobweb was just trying too hard for us and lost her footing.

Sadly, she was never as good again as she was on that day and her chance of becoming a champion evaporated with that one misplaced front foot. That said, we’d had a good year with her and what we’d achieved with a £20 dog out of a family pet had not gone unnoticed and the friends we’d made racing her opened the door on the big time for us.