Wheeling Island Racetrack's Saturday Doubleheader Full of Great Greyhound Performances

No dog track in the country gives its patrons a better variety of distance races each week than Wheeling Island Racetrack and Gaming Center in Wheeling, West Virginia does. A perfect example of this is their most recent Saturday doubleheader; thirty seven races, with six of them being contested over 678 yards, a pair of marathons, and all the rest 548 yard affairs. Wheeling Island Racetrack, located on the West Virginia-Ohio border, not only offers a lot of route races, they have some of the best greyhounds in the nation competing in them, as the purses at Wheeling Island are second to none, being supplemented by a percentage of the slot machine take from the accompanying casino.

Right out of the gate in the matinee, Wheeling Island's racing department gave the fans a 761 yard marathon to figure out. In it, Must be A Champ ran down All Around Champ as the favorite, getting most of the players off on the right foot. In the third, Greys Blak Magic came from fourth to corral Troy Sharp down the stretch in a Grade A long distance heat, the black female's sixth victory of 2007. Immediately following that marathon, Janus, a greyhound that took twelve tries last winter before breaking her Maiden, won her fifth Grade AA sprint in her last seven attempts, catching Ugo Lonesome Boy by a nose at the finish line as the 3-2 chalk.

The first 678 yard route came in the seventh, a rout by CS Bosco after the May Night of Stars champion had dropped from the AA ranks to mix it up with lesser dogs than he is used to battling. His ten length win came in a career best 37.95 seconds, as the three year old brindle male upped his lifetime earnings at Wheeling Island to over thirty-two thousand dollars. In comparison, KB's Ali Sheba won a Grade D route in 38.53 later on in the matinee card. In the seventeenth, Primco Mayes, a puppy that has yet to miss the pay sheet in thirteen starts at Wheeling Island, advanced to AA with the day's fastest sprint clocking, a 29.90, the only sub-thirty second effort of the afternoon.

One of Wheeling Island's top sprinter was in the nineteenth, as Makin Bakin was looking for her seventeenth triumph of the meet out of twenty-seven times to post. Bakin usually does her best work while on the front, but on this day she found it in her to come from off the pace, running down both Powerful Trent and Flying Speedo in thirty seconds flat. Bakin came from Derby Lane in Florida and has gone off as the crowd's choice virtually every time out since late April, when she put together a five race winning streak.

The evening program got off to a rousing start when 17-1 long shot Iruska Watkins won the 678 yard first from behind. Watkins had lines showing in the program that could have made an onion cry, but despite this the black male won for just the fifth time in seventy-two Wheeling outings. In the third, Van's Escalade had everyone checking the timer, as the puppy broke his Maiden on his first try in the entire day's best clocking over the 548 yards, a 29.84 as a dime to the dollar favorite. Escalade had looked impressive enough in schooling races, winning one by seven and another by fifteen, and he shouldn't take too long dallying in the lower grades at Wheeling Island, although the lower tier dogs there would be Grade As at most tracks.

Swiss Maid, making her third route venture in the sixth, went off at 6-5 odds, but it was Heartland Hero who grabbed the brass ring for the first time in the top Wheeling level, going box to wire in 38.24, as Swiss Maid finished a solid third. Bow Grasshopper, who hasn't been at double-digit odds since last March when he was ascending the Wheeling grading ladder, was sent off at 13-1 in the AA ninth, and wouldn't you know it, he zoomed to the turn in second and took over the lead late to reward his backers with a $29 win ticket and a $1,300 triple. Grasshopper's victory was his thirteenth at Wheeling after shipping north from Florida's Ebro Greyhound Park in the winter.

The top dogs at Daytona Beach were happy to see Armitage head north as well, as the fine sprinter made his way recently to Wheeling Island to seek her fortune. To show the disparity between the two tracks, Armitage, a winner of two dozen races in Florida, was started in Grade B, but she took to her new surroundings right away, winning at the wire as the gamblers bet her down to seventy cents on the dollar. In the day's last event, I've Gotyou Babe, who had lost the lead in seven straight races, refused to lose to Jack Whistler, the former Palm Beach star. Babe stayed in front all the way, hanging on by a head over Jack, as the pair both beat Gable Indonesia, who was looking to win four in a row.