By Justin Robertson
JUNCTION Village greyhound trainer Russell McCray completed his own personal daily-double in the Waterloo Cup meeting at Lang Lang on Sunday.
The first leg was winning the Max Johnson Memorial, a support event to the Cup, which is Australia’s richest coursing event.
The Max Johnson Memorial has been running for the past eight years and was named after a well known trainer-breeder and sponsored by McCray and bookmaker Gary Thomas.
“He won countless Waterloo Cups in South Australia and Victoria and It was great to win because I was such good friends with old Max,” McCray said.
“I strapped greyhounds for him for years when I was a young fellow, we worked on greyhounds together and became very staunch friends over the years.”
Coursing is run like a tennis draw where two dogs race each other in a knock-out sprint, seeing the winner advancing to the next round. This year the winner was judged on superior pace only, not on aspects of greyhound chasing as previously done.
Unlike the Waterloo Cup, the memorial event is restricted to young greyhounds that aren’t old enough to run in the derby or the oaks and it’s run late in the season for the pups to get a chance to run in a high-profile event, like the Waterloo Cup.
The second leg of McCray’s double was attributed to the dog he trained to win the race, Potsy’s Boy.
“The race is normally run at Benalla and the boys who own it are from the Benalla football club, so that was a nice touch,” he said. “But also, the dog is named after another close mate of mine, Jeff “Potsy” Harris, who died in a car accident last year – he bred the dog and sold it to the Benalla boys.”
McCray also trains another one of Harris’s dogs, the older sister of Potsy’s Boy, champion bitch Special Sign who has won 19 races from 38 starts including 11 wins in the city.
It was the second time McCray, who is based at a boutique property at Junction Village, has won the event and it was all the sweeter this time round.
“To win for Max and Potsy was very special,” he said. “They were both close mates of mine and it was great to have a win.”
