Match Fixing in Greyhound Racing: Doping, Ringers and Who Got Caught

On 16 February 2015, ABC's Four Corners broadcast a programme called "Making a Killing", and Australian greyhound racing has never quite shaken it off. The covert footage showed live piglets, possums and rabbits tied to lures in greyhound training across New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Several leading trainers and administrators interviewed for the programme denied the practice. Some were later shown to be involved. Within eighteen months, the Premier of New South Wales had announced a ban on the sport across the state.

One thing needs saying straight away. Nobody in that footage was fixing a race for a betting coup. It was a cruelty scandal about training methods. Yet it's the story that defines greyhound racing's integrity problem, because it played out exactly where the sport is weakest: with the dog, out of sight, long before it ever reaches the traps.

That pattern runs right through the sport's history. Proven, betting-motivated race fixes are surprisingly thin on the public record. What keeps turning up instead is doping, the odd ringer, and regulators who were slow to act or quick to keep things quiet.

Our hub on match fixing in sport sets the dogs alongside spot-fixing, tanking and the rest. This one stays at the track: the methods, the cases, and how every one of them finished.

You can't bribe a greyhound. Anyone trying to bend a result has to work on the animal itself or on its identity, and the methods fall into fairly distinct camps.

• Doping to slow or speed a dog. Back in 1953 a Scotland Yard detective published a list of 29 stimulants and depressants suspected of being used by doping gangs. Modern cases tend to involve positive tests for cocaine, EPO or other banned substances.
• Ringers. A substituted dog runs under another's name. Two men went to jail for trying exactly that at Dunfermline in 1953.
• Trouble on the track. Australian stewards record "marring" (one dog interfering with another) and "fail to chase" as racing offences. Mostly they're about a dog's behaviour, but they're precisely the sort of thing integrity officials keep a close eye on.
• Training cruelty. Live baiting happened because some trainers believed a dog that had chased and caught a live animal would chase harder in a race. That's a performance motive, not a betting plot.

One rule colours how every doping case should be read. In British racing the trainer is the "absolute insurer" of the dog's condition, responsible for any positive however the substance got there. So a positive is a breach of the rules, not proof that anyone set out to fix a race, and plenty of cocaine cases have been contested as environmental contamination.

Start with the field. A British race has six runners, so the condition of one dog can decide the outcome in a way a single horse in a big handicap rarely does. Then pile on the volume. British greyhound racing is screened in betting shops through the Bookmakers' Afternoon Greyhound Service (BAGS), with tote and bookmaker betting on race after race. Betting isn't a sideshow at the dogs. It's the product. If you're new to how the sport works, our greyhound racing betting guide covers the traps, grades and bet types.

The dog can't tell anyone what happened, either. Everything runs through the trainer, which is why the rules hold the trainer strictly responsible. And kennels are private places. The Australian scandal showed how long practices on private training tracks could carry on unpoliced, with the regulator failing to deal with them.

For our money, the deepest weakness has been structural. In Ireland and in New South Wales, the body promoting the sport commercially was also the one policing it. Both were eventually forced to split those jobs: Ireland with an independent control committee after 2006, NSW with a new Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission after 2016. When the people selling the sport are also the people testing it, bad news has a habit of staying in the drawer.

The headline cases stretch from a Scottish ringer in 1953 to an Australian tribunal in 2024. Only the first is a classic fix. The rest are doping and welfare cases, and that's the honest shape of this sport's record.

The 1953 crackdown

In 1953, Scotland Yard detective Stan Baker published "Greyhound Racing with the lid off", a book listing 29 stimulants and depressants suspected of being used by doping gangs. The National Greyhound Racing Club (NGRC) was given the job of tracking down the gangs targeting both its own tracks and the independents. Suspected is the key word, mind: this was suspicion about gangs, not a conviction of anyone.

That same year did produce a genuine fix attempt. Two men were jailed for 30 days in Dunfermline for trying to run a ringer, a substituted dog, at Crossgates Greyhound Stadium. It's the cleanest fixing conviction in this whole story, and proof that racing's oldest trick travels from the turf to the dogs, as our guide to fixing and nobbling in horse racing shows.

John McGee and the NGRC

John "Ginger" McGee, Irish-born and seven times champion trainer of Great Britain, took the NGRC on in court. In the 1990s the club revoked his trainer's licence after a positive urine test on one of his greyhounds. McGee disputed the severity, and a High Court judge overturned the suspension. The NGRC kept the legal fight going, McGee went back to Ireland, and he was absent from NGRC racing for four years.

In 2001 a second positive urine sample saw his licence withdrawn again, with no further application to be considered until January 2003. Both cases were about positive tests under the strict-liability rule. Neither was a finding that he set out to fix a race, and nobody should read them that way.

The 2006 newspaper row

In 2006 the News of the World claimed cocaine use was rife in greyhound racing. The NGRC hit back with numbers. Of more than 70,000 samples taken that year, only four were positive for cocaine, and it put three of those down to human contamination. That left one case.

Shawfield, 2009 to 2019

Glasgow's Shawfield Stadium told a far less comfortable story. In September 2019 the Sunday Post reported 28 positive tests there since 2009, five of them involving cocaine, which the paper pointed out is potentially fatal for dogs. Ten positives came in 2018 alone. Of the 28 doping offences, just four led to trainers being banned, and five brought no further action at all.

The penalties were a patchwork. One trainer was fined £750 for a first breach and lost his licence after a second. Another, whose two dogs tested positive for cocaine in June 2018 (one of them had won at 3/1), denied giving them anything and was fined £1,500 with a 12-month suspended training ban. The Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB) said it had increased sampling at Shawfield by 50% and that the positives had since stopped, adding that there was no place for anyone who "purposely endangers the safety or wellbeing of a greyhound".

Florida, 2017

Across the Atlantic, Florida's Department of Business and Professional Regulation revoked trainer Malcolm McAllister's racing licence on 24 April 2017, after five of his dogs tested positive for cocaine following a January race. McAllister did not dispute the findings and waived a hearing. He wrote that someone he had hired had dropped or administered the drug, and that it was not him. Florida's records showed 46 cocaine positives in the state's greyhound industry since 2008.

The Irish case is less about the dogs than about the people meant to be watching them. Trainers Paul Hennessy and John Kiely had dogs test positive for erythropoietin (EPO) after races, and Bord na gCon's own disciplinary committee fined each of them €1,000 after a hearing. That was the regulatory outcome, and it's where their part in the story ends.

The real scandal came next. Bord na gCon didn't publish the decision as it normally would, on the grounds that doing so was "not in the greyhound industry's interest". Instead it ran trade-paper adverts saying EPO was banned and testing had begun. A disciplinary committee member told the board he believed some trainers used EPO to treat illnesses, and that the two men "did not realise what the implications were". That was his view, not a finding.

Once the suppression came out in early 2006, it turned into a full-blown political row. Chief executive Aidan Tynan, who had told the Minister, was dismissed, though the board maintained the sacking had nothing to do with EPO. Chairman Paschal Taggart later resigned early. Fine Gael tabled the Greyhound Industry (Doping Regulation) Bill 2006, and Sports Minister John O'Donoghue commissioned former Justice secretary general Tim Dalton to review the affair.

And the reform was real. An independent control committee chaired by Kevin Heffernan, the former Dublin GAA football manager, took over investigating and sanctioning doping, and legislation came to require verdicts and fines to be published. Bord na gCon's head of regulation, Daniel O'Leary, said that in 2006 fewer than 1 per cent of the 5,600 dogs tested were found to have been given banned substances.

"...in effect, rampant and chronic." — the Special Commission of Inquiry led by former High Court justice Michael McHugh, on live baiting in New South Wales, July 2016

The McHugh inquiry pulled no punches. It found live baiting in NSW was widespread, that Greyhound Racing NSW had failed to deal with it, and that it was likely to carry on once the spotlight moved elsewhere. The Greyhound Racing NSW board was dismissed and chief executive Brent Hogan stood aside.

On 7 July 2016 the NSW Premier announced that greyhound racing would be banned in the state from 1 July 2017, and the ACT followed. Then came the U-turn. On 11 October 2016 the ban was reversed with new conditions attached, and the Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission was created to separate regulating the sport from running it. Victoria, Queensland and South Australia stayed in the sport throughout.

The courts dealt with individuals head on. John Cauchi, licensed manager of the Boxhill trial track, and his brother Tony pleaded guilty to a combined 15 counts of serious animal cruelty and live-baiting offences. In December 2015 John was sentenced to 18 months in jail with a 12-month non-parole period, and Tony to 18 months suspended, the court noting his intellectual impairment. Telopea trainer Ian Morgan pleaded guilty to an act of animal cruelty involving a possum and was jailed for 12 months, eligible for parole after nine. All three were banned from contact with animals for 20 years.

Queensland had its own reckoning. Track owner Tom Noble pleaded guilty and on 6 September 2016 received a three-year wholly suspended sentence on 15 counts of serious animal cruelty; the state's Attorney-General announced an appeal against it as manifestly inadequate. Queensland had six trainers suspended, while Victoria suspended 15 and Greyhound Racing Victoria's chairman resigned.

In Britain, GBGB governs 18 licensed stadiums in England and Wales as of March 2026, with its Rules of Racing enforced by stipendiary stewards. Rule 173 is the sharp end. It lets stewards, vets or the sampling steward order a test at any time on any greyhound due to run, that has run in a trial or race, or that is kept in licensed kennels. Refuse a test and disciplinary action follows, and a dog whose sample comes back positive is disqualified from the race where it was taken.

The aim is to get urine from all six dogs in a race, and a dog that repeatedly can't provide a sample can be ruled off. GBGB has held UKAS accreditation for registered racing since 2010. Penalties come out of inquiries and vary enormously, from a reprimand or fine through suspended bans to losing a licence, as Shawfield showed.

Victoria goes a step further and publishes its integrity numbers in monthly reports. In September 2024, Greyhound Racing Victoria's Integrity Unit took 830 swabs and had four positives back from the laboratory, while stewards recorded 15 marring and 42 fail-to-chase offences. Five positive-swab cases reached the Victorian Racing Tribunal.

Two cases from that report show the range. John Boreland was disqualified for a total of 24 months after pleading guilty to presenting greyhounds with permanently banned amphetamine-type substances at four events, plus a positive out-of-competition sample. Vincent Daffy received a six-month suspension, wholly suspended for 12 months, for salbutamol at Traralgon on 20 November 2023.

Swabs are only half of the detection job. Betting-market monitoring is the other half, and our guide on how betting integrity units catch fixers explains how that side works across sport.

Settlement first, because that's the bit that actually touches your account. Bookmakers settle on the official result, and under GBGB's rules a positive sample disqualifies the dog from that race once the result comes back. Whether that changes a bet you've already been paid on depends on your bookmaker's rules on amended results, and they're worth knowing before you ever need them. Our guide to why bets get voided explains the usual grounds and how to challenge a void that looks wrong.

The red flags are best read as what investigators spot after the event, not as a tipping tool. A heavily backed dog drifting badly, or a rank outsider suddenly attracting the money, can catch an integrity officer's eye. But dogs drift for trap draws, track conditions and a hundred honest reasons, and one odd move on its own tells you very little.

Where you bet matters more. We'd take licensed bookmakers and big, televised meetings with deep markets every time: they're far harder to bend than a quiet graded race with thin liquidity. In a six-dog race the pool of outcomes is small, which makes strange money stand out, provided it's going through a book that is actually looking.

"...the risks of poor welfare outweigh the likely positive aspects." — Scottish Animal Welfare Commission, on greyhound racing where gambling and commercial activity are involved, 9 March 2023

Here's our take. Greyhound racing's integrity story was never really about men in raincoats arranging results in a back room. It's about what happens to the dog, because the dog is the only thing anyone can manipulate. That's why the sport's biggest scandals, Shawfield and Four Corners among them, turned up in sample pots and on private training tracks rather than in betting slips.

The encouraging part is that the weak points are known, and the fixes work wherever they've been tried. Ireland had to publish its doping verdicts after the EPO row. NSW had to split the regulator from the promoter. Victoria puts its swab and marring numbers out in public every month. The sports that recover are the ones willing to make bad news public, a lesson horse racing, football and boxing have all learned the hard way.

What punters should take from this:

• Doping and fixing are not the same thing. A positive test breaks the rules on strict liability; it isn't proof that anyone tried to fix a race.
• Read the outcome, not the headline. McGee's first suspension was overturned by a High Court judge, and in the Shawfield and Florida cases trainers denied responsibility or blamed others.
• Live baiting was cruelty, not a betting plot. The 2015 scandal was about training methods, and it led to jail terms and a new regulator in NSW.
• Six dogs make strange money visible. Small fields are exposed to one dog's condition, but they also make odd market moves easier to spot.
• Know your bookmaker's rules on amended results. A disqualification after a positive test only comes once the sample is analysed, after the race.
• Stick to licensed books and big meetings. Deep, well-watched markets are the hardest to bend.

Related guides

• Match Fixing in Horse Racing: Ringers, Stopped Rides, Doping and the Famous Cases
• Match Fixing in Sport: How It's Done, Famous Cases and Every Sport Hit
• Snooker Match Fixing: The Scandals That Shook the Baize
• Fixed Fights in Boxing: Dives, Mob Control and Judging Scandals
• Match Fixing in Esports: CS, StarCraft and the Integrity Fight

18+. Please gamble responsibly. For free, confidential support visit BeGambleAware.org. Concerns about the integrity of a greyhound race in Britain can be reported to the Greyhound Board of Great Britain.