Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was a bright and striking night on the grandstand at Dundalk, but a cool wind blew as the clock turned towards the first race at 19:50. I went back to the car for my coat, but while a few people came out to watch the greyhounds race, most preferred to follow the action on huge television screens which had been set up at the bar downstairs. Chips were being served in there, and pints drawn into plastic cups. Upstairs, waiters in the the hospitality suite were serving wine to a more prosperous clientele who squeaked on the leather furniture and sat with their backs to the track.

The first race was run between six black dogs, and these emerged from their enclosure with a mixture of owners and trainers in tow. They jumped and wagged their tails, looking like they’d been drawn into the scene with a swirl of pencil strokes. They paused to be seen, then they were taken out to the starting line and a voice on the tannoy broadcast a list of complex numerical details to the almost-empty stadium.

When everything was ready, a polyester hare began to move along its rail. A horn blew and the machine which drove this lure gathered speed in a rising, mechanical moan. It rushed past me and turned around the bend behind the boxes. As it passed them, the doors opened in a single fluid burst and out came the dogs like a torrent of oil. The digital timer blurred into a frenzy of counting as they rushed above the sand, and it’s only by looking back at still photographs that I can make sense of that movement; dogs frozen in every stage of bent intensity – but the live impression was simply a blaze of frantic nodding, and a sense that the ground was hardly being used. The first race was finished in 21 seconds, and they hadn’t even run a full circuit of the track, only an extended shape of the letter J. 

Then the handlers were running to catch the dogs and they were jumping and panting and wagging their tails. The leads were replaced immediately, and order was restored as if the greyhounds themselves could not believe it. At full speed, they’d been covering seventeen metres a second; something like thirty seven miles an hour – a full week’s work in less time than it would take to read the names of the runners.

Activity like this seems designed for the replay, and what I’d seen made better sense when I reviewed my photographs and saw the race being replayed on the screens at the bar. Beyond the blur, I learned there had been no winner until the corner, and then Number Three pulled far ahead of the others. But there was no obvious reason why that dog had won the day, and the same pattern replayed in all the races I saw that night until I started to think that if cornering is what separates First from all the other places, the race itself should be circular.

Number Three’s victory was filmed and shown live to bookies across the UK and Ireland. Several racetracks work together for this broadcast, and the races are staggered with that audience in mind. Once the action at Dundalk is over, the cameras go live to Doncaster or Perry Bar, and many races are patched together in a pattern of highlights so that viewers can enjoy an unending roll of excitement and provocation. But holding only one piece of that puzzle at Dundalk, my action was confined to twenty one seconds of excitement every quarter hour. There were long lags, and a distorted sense of time passing. After the first race, three punters went back inside to their pints, leaving me alone in the cold wind. A security guard asked if I’d come far, while a cardboard coffee cup rolled and fell in exaggerated steps down the empty grandstand. The place had been forgotten for now, and I wondered how many unseen eyes would return to Dundalk in fourteen minutes.

Earlier in the day, I had been to hear Mass at Drogheda. When it became obvious that I would be the only person in the congregation, I winced with embarrassment – I’m not even a Catholic, and I’d only come for the sake of curiosity. But the Priest was unfazed, and he devoted most of his attention to a camera hidden somewhere near the altar. When it was time to leave, I thanked him for the service and stood up from the pew. He looked up as if he’d forgotten I was there, then he pointed at a laptop and said that the service had been watched by a community of online subscribers from across the world. I told him that was amazing, and he agreed, saying “Sure, it’s changed the way we do business”.