GBGB's 1.07% Injury Rate: How the 2024 Figure Is Calculated

The 1.07% headline

When GBGB published its 2024 injury data, the number that led every report was 1.07% — the track injury rate across all licensed stadiums in Great Britain. That figure represents 3,809 injuries from 355,682 individual race runs. It’s the lowest injury rate GBGB has ever recorded, and it sits at the centre of one of the most contested statistical arguments in UK sport: what does the number actually measure, what does it miss, and how useful is it for understanding what happens at a track like Hove?

I’ve been reading GBGB injury reports for years, and my view is that the 1.07% is a real, carefully calculated figure that tells you something important — and that it also, by design, excludes categories of harm that a fuller picture would include. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and treating the number as either a vindication or a scandal is analytically lazy.

What counts as a race run

The denominator — 355,682 race runs — is the total number of individual greyhound starts across all GBGB-licensed tracks during 2024. Every time a dog breaks from a trap in a licensed race, that’s one run. A six-dog race generates six runs. A twelve-race meeting generates roughly 72 runs. Multiply across 18 licensed stadiums operating year-round, and you reach the 355,682 total.

What counts. Only starts in licensed, regulated races under GBGB jurisdiction. Trials — non-competitive runs used for grading, fitness assessment and qualification — are not included. Training gallops aren’t included. Injuries sustained in trials or training don’t appear in the 1.07% figure, which is a material exclusion because a proportion of career-ending injuries in greyhound racing happen outside of race conditions. The denominator is clean — licensed race runs only — but the population of injury events it captures is narrower than the population of all injuries a racing greyhound might sustain.

Why this matters. If you include trial injuries in the numerator but keep the race-run denominator, the rate goes up. If you expand the denominator to include trial runs as well, the rate might go up or down depending on the ratio of trial injuries to trial frequency. GBGB’s stated methodology counts race-day injuries against race-day starts, which is internally consistent and auditable. Whether it’s the right frame depends on what question you’re trying to answer.

What counts as an injury

The numerator — 3,809 injuries — captures track injuries recorded by the attending veterinary surgeon at each meeting. The GBGB classification includes muscular injuries, fractures, lacerations, dislocations, and other veterinary-confirmed conditions that occur during or immediately after a race. Each injury is recorded in the GBGB database with the dog’s identity, the race, the track, the date and the clinical detail.

Severity ranges. The 3,809 figure includes everything from minor muscle strains (dog races again within days) to fatal injuries (dog dies trackside or is euthanised immediately). That range is important because a single percentage conflates conditions with radically different outcomes. A muscle strain and a catastrophic fracture both count as one injury in the numerator. The headline rate doesn’t distinguish between a dog that missed one race and a dog that never raced again.

What’s excluded. Injuries that manifest after the dog has left the track — delayed onset injuries, soft-tissue conditions that present in the days following a race, stress-related conditions identified at home kennel inspections — are not captured in the track injury data. Nor are welfare conditions that aren’t classified as injuries: heatstroke, dehydration, behavioural distress. The 1.07% is an injury rate, not a welfare rate, and the distinction is not trivial.

Trend from 2020 to 2024

The trend line is where the data becomes genuinely useful, because it strips out the limitations of any single year’s snapshot and shows direction. GBGB’s 2024 commentary reports that the track injury rate dropped to a record low of 1.07%, while the track fatality rate halved from 0.06% in 2020 to 0.03% in 2024. Both trends point downward, which is meaningful regardless of the methodological caveats.

What drove the improvement. Three structural changes coincided with the declining rate. First, track surface standards — GBGB tightened the requirements for sand composition, drainage and maintenance at licensed tracks, and several stadiums (including major venues) invested in surface upgrades. Second, veterinary oversight intensity increased — more frequent kennel inspections, more rigorous pre-race health checks, and a shift toward proactive injury prevention rather than reactive treatment. Third, race-day protocols changed — stricter grading to reduce mismatches that produce dangerous crowding at the bends, improved trap maintenance, and faster access to on-track veterinary intervention when incidents occur.

The counterpoint. The total number of injuries in 2024 — 3,809 — is not a small number. And the total number of racing-related deaths — 346 in 2024 — includes trackside fatalities (123) plus dogs that died or were euthanised as a result of racing injuries in the days and weeks following a race. The percentage rate is declining, but the absolute number of dogs harmed remains material, and welfare advocacy groups have been clear that a declining rate doesn’t equate to an acceptable rate.

Comparisons: UK vs US track metrics

One of the data points that regularly enters the welfare debate is the comparison between UK and US greyhound injury rates. Academic work, including research published by Andrew Knight in 2018, has examined injury data across jurisdictions, comparing the UK rate (which was higher than 1.07% at the time of the study) with US track data showing rates around 0.55%. The comparison is often cited by welfare critics to argue that UK greyhound racing is less safe than its American counterpart.

The comparison is structurally complicated. Track design differs (US tracks are typically larger-circumference ovals with different bend geometry), surface types differ (sand vs various US materials), race distances differ, and — critically — the definition of what constitutes a reportable injury differs between jurisdictions. A like-for-like comparison requires standardising all of these variables, which Knight’s work acknowledged. The 1.07% UK rate in 2024 sits lower than the UK rate at the time of the 2018 study, which means the gap has likely narrowed — but without a simultaneous, methodologically identical US dataset for 2024, the comparison can’t be made with precision.

What the comparison does tell you. UK greyhound racing tracks produce injuries at a rate that is both measurable and declining. Whether the rate is acceptable is a value judgement that the data informs but doesn’t resolve. The data does, however, provide a factual basis for the policy decisions — like the Welsh and Scottish bans of 2026 — that will shape the future of the sport across Great Britain.

How Hove likely sits within the aggregate

GBGB publishes the 1.07% as an aggregate across all 18 licensed stadiums. Track-level injury data is collected but not routinely published at individual-track resolution, which means Hove’s specific injury rate isn’t publicly available as a separate figure. That’s a limitation for anyone trying to assess Hove-specific welfare outcomes from the national data.

What we can infer. Hove is a well-maintained stadium with a long operational history, a sand surface that has been in use since 1987, and a five-meeting-per-week schedule that produces a large sample of race runs. Tracks with higher meeting frequency tend to have more robust surface-maintenance routines (the economics require it — a deteriorating surface produces poor times, which depress betting revenue, which reduces income), and Hove’s maintenance standards are consistent with the track’s commercial position in the GBGB calendar.

What we can’t infer. Whether Hove’s rate is above or below the national 1.07% average without the specific data. A track’s rate is influenced by surface condition, meeting frequency, grade distribution (higher-grade races with faster dogs may produce different injury profiles from lower-grade races), and local weather patterns. Hove, on the south coast, benefits from milder temperatures than northern tracks, which affects surface grip — but that climatic advantage may be offset by other factors. The honest answer is that Hove’s rate is unknowable from the published aggregate, and anyone who claims to know it is extrapolating beyond the data. The complete Hove track guide covers the welfare framework that governs all GBGB-licensed tracks including Hove.