Windguru is predicting continual rain throughout the day and evening for Greyville. The official word is that it is cloudy with a 73% chance of rain, with a 15-20 kph south westerly tailwind blowing.
Despite that gloomy forecast it is all systems go for tonight’s resumption of the popular Friday night racing series which runs all the way through to May 19 in 2017.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of night racing at Greyville after the opener in February 1996 attracted a crowd of over 7300.
That apparently was not the first night race meeting in South Africa, according to a report on www.goldcircle.co.za
Pic- thanks to the Hartford Collection
The late great racing doyen Jean Jaffee writes in her book They Raced To Win that in the 1945/1946 racing season Joseph Dorfman formed a syndicate which established the Vereeniging Turf Club, whose main objective was to race horses both by day and night.
Dorfman had previously inaugurated night greyhound racing at the Wembley Stadium near Turffontein.
Vereeniging Turf Club soon acquired majority shares in the Auckland Park Racing Club. This club had held highly popular race meetings about 60 days a year at the Auckland Park racecourse, which was on the site where the Helen Joseph Memorial Hospital now stands (the racecourse was disbanded in the early 1960s).
The Vereeniging Turf Club also purchased the Germiston Sporting Club. However, their attempts to gain control of the Johannesburg Turf Club and the Clairwood Turf Club failed. Their bid to monopolise racing in the country was thus foiled. However, they did later manage to buy the Eastern Districts Sporting Club at Benoni.
In 1946 Dorfman travelled to the USA to study the methods employed in night racing and to buy the necessary equipment.
Shortly thereafter, according to the publication The Centenary of the Durban Turf Club, night race meetings were held at The Vaal racecourse for a few months.
The Jockey Club was opposed to the meetings and had consequently brought in a rule stating no racing under Jockey Club rules could go ahead after 7 p.m. Furthermore, any trainer or jockey participating in unauthorised racing risked having their licence withdrawn.
Nevertheless, Dorfman went ahead with his plan.
The inaugural meeting was washed out by a violent hailstorm which shattered the floodlights and the next meeting was also washed out. Meetings were subsequently held but came to an end after a few months. Jean Jaffee’s book goes on to say South Africa had its first experience of the photo-finish camera at the Vaal racecourse on March 26, 1947.
However, there is no reference to who brought the cameras in and whether they were a by-product of Dorfman’s trip to the USA, which if it was the case would have been a positive outcome of the country’s first foray into night racing.
The person who first put night racing on the table in Durban was the Durban Turf Club Chairman J. Arnand Bestel, who in 1970 suggested they stage midweek night meetings.
However, the cost of installing floodlights seemed prohibitive. The idea was raised again in 1982 by Tony Stiebel.
Stiebel and Dr. Nic Labuschagne researched the matter between 1984 and 1985.
The possibility of staging it was seriously brought to the table again in 1990, but by this time the costs of installing floodlights had escalated.
However, despite a further escalation in costs, it was decided in 1995 under the chairmanship of Stiebel to institute night racing at Greyville.
