The Race by Nina Allan

eighteen and something of a prodigy. The pair were too young and inexperienced to be anything but rank outsiders, but they looked good together and entering them for the race made perfect sense. In a year or two they might be in with a genuine chance, and to any interested spectators it would look like Del was playing canny. Preparing them for the big time, giving them a taste of the action, whatever. No one would expect them to progress beyond the heats, but they’d be watched. More importantly they would help to divert attention from Tash and Limlasker.
    Limlasker was a famous champion and well respected. His late entry into the Delawarr would raise a few eyebrows, but with Tommy and Celia also in the running, most would assume that Del had chosen the Delawarr Triple to be Lim’s farewell race, his final lap of honour, if you will. It was a fair enough assumption. No one would be expecting him to place.
    I had to admit it was a strong plan. On the night before the race, Del phoned to tell me that Lim had run down the previous year’s winning time three times that week in practice sessions.
    “And he’ll go faster during the race, he always does,” Del said. He sounded high as a kite.
    “I hope you haven’t been overdoing things. You don’t want him to peak too soon.”
    “That dog loves to race, you know that. He thrives on it. Why don’t you trust me?”
    An edge of irritation had crept into his voice, that tone, so familiar from when we were younger, that said I was a moron and what the hell was the use in him trying to explain anything to me anyway.
    I knew he’d get next to no sleep that night, an hour or two around sunrise at the most.
    “I do trust you,” I said. “I’m just nervous, I suppose.”
    “Well don’t be, and shut the frig up. This thing’s a done deal.”
    “Get some sleep,” I said. I wished I could say something more helpful, something that might break through his bravado, not to damage his confidence but to comfort him. I could barely imagine how lonely he must be feeling. He couldn’t even talk to Limlasker, because Lim was with Tash.
    ~*~
    The heats for the Delawarr used to be seeded, but there was always some controversy raging about how the rankings were arrived at, and so the system was dropped in favour of random computer selection. That seemed to work okay for a while, then someone accused someone else of hacking the program and loading the draw. Whichever system was used, the only certainty was that somebody somewhere would object to it. That’s why the race board finally brought in the Rooster.
    The Rooster is basically the same as the machine that’s used for selecting the National Lottery, with the added attraction of it letting out a deafening claxon blast at the end of each cycle – hence the name.
    The name of each competitor is printed on to a plastic ball, and to avoid any accusations of ball-tampering, each ball is weighed in public on an electronic scale. Once they’ve been weighed, the balls are loaded into the Rooster. The machine is operated by pulling a lever – the name of the person who gets to do that is decided by a prize draw. The balls speed round and round inside a transparent plastic drum. At the end of sixty seconds, balls are released into a drawer at the bottom in batches of six. The drawer is opened and the names read out. The prelim heats go up on the board in the order they are called.
    The whole process takes about two hours, which sounds a lot but it’s become part of the ritual now, people look forward to it. The dogs themselves stay out of sight in their pens until their heat is called. As the race day dawned, there were one hundred and eighty registered participants for the Delawarr Triple. That made thirty preliminary heats, ten hurdles each over eight hundred metres. The first two from each heat would go through to the quarters – ten heats of six, again over eight hundred metres. The winner of each quarter, plus the two fastest