Sunderland Greyhound Fixtures — Weekly Schedule, BAGS Days & Open Racing

Sunderland greyhound fixtures follow a rhythm that has barely changed in years: racing on up to five days a week, split between open racing nights with a paying crowd and daytime BAGS meetings built for the betting shop screens. If you want to be at the track for the big occasion, Friday is your night. If you want to study form and follow results from home, the midweek BAGS cards and Tuesday evening fixtures give you extra bites at the data.

That schedule makes Sunderland one of the busiest greyhound venues in the north-east of England. It also means the track generates a near-continuous stream of results, form lines and grading movements — useful raw material whether you are a regular punter, a casual visitor planning your first trip, or someone trying to make sense of the numbers on a result sheet.

What follows is a breakdown of when each type of fixture takes place, what distinguishes them from one another, and where Sunderland’s two Category One competitions fit into the annual calendar.

The Weekly Fixture Grid

The standard week at Sunderland runs to a predictable pattern. Friday evening is the flagship session — the one with the biggest crowd, the best-graded fields and the restaurant packages that start from £18.70. Sunday afternoons offer a second open-racing window, slightly more relaxed in atmosphere but still drawing a decent trackside turnout. Between them, these two fixtures are where you will see the highest quality racing at the stadium.

Monday and Wednesday are BAGS days — daytime meetings, typically starting in the early afternoon, staged primarily for the benefit of bookmakers who need live racing content for their shops and online platforms. Tuesday evening adds another fixture to the weekly schedule with free admission. The Bookmakers Afternoon Greyhound Service funds the daytime fixtures, and the coverage is broadcast via SIS and TRP to betting outlets across Britain. BAGS meetings run to roughly the same race intervals as open nights — around 15 minutes between races — but the atmosphere is different. Crowds are thin to nonexistent. The focus is entirely on providing a betting product.

The schedule occasionally adjusts depending on the time of year. Summer months sometimes see slightly different timings, and bank holidays can shuffle things around. But the core pattern of regular fixtures holds true for most of the year, giving Sunderland a fixture density that keeps trainers busy and ensures a steady supply of form data for anyone analysing the track.

First-race times vary by meeting type. Open racing on Friday evenings typically kicks off around 6:20 pm, while Sunday sessions tend to start earlier, around 11:00 am. Tuesday evening fixtures begin around 6:37 pm. BAGS meetings on Monday and Wednesday have their own broadcast windows, usually starting around 2:30 pm. The official Sunderland greyhound stadium website publishes the confirmed fixture list with precise first-race times — it is worth checking before you travel, as occasional changes do happen.

One thing that catches newcomers off guard is just how much racing this schedule produces. Five meetings a week, each with 12 to 14 races, adds up to around 65 races every seven days from a single stadium. Over a year that is north of 3,000 individual races — a significant chunk of form history to work with if you are serious about tracking patterns.

Open Racing vs BAGS — What Changes

The distinction between open racing and BAGS is not just about scheduling. It affects the quality of the card, the prize money on offer, the grading of the fields, and the overall experience — whether you are watching trackside or following results on a screen.

Open racing nights attract the stronger greyhounds. Trainers typically save their best dogs for Friday and Sunday, where prize money is higher and the grading tends to feature A and B-grade races. The fields are more competitive, the form lines more meaningful, and the margins at the finish tighter. For anyone studying results, these are the meetings that produce the most reliable data for assessing a dog’s true ability.

BAGS meetings, by contrast, tend to feature lower-graded fields — C, D and sometimes E-grade races. The dogs are not necessarily inferior in an absolute sense; many of them are well-run animals at the right level. But the overall quality spread is wider, and the racing can be less predictable. Nationwide, the BAGS system generates approximately 74 meetings every week across all licensed tracks in Britain, producing the bulk of the country’s greyhound betting content. A single week of BAGS racing involves around 5,772 individual greyhound runs, which gives some idea of the scale of this operation.

Prize money is the clearest dividing line. Open-night purses at Sunderland are meaningfully higher than BAGS equivalents, and that difference filters down to which trainers enter which dogs. A trainer with a promising A-graded sprinter will not waste that dog’s peak form on a Monday afternoon BAGS card if a Friday night open race is four days away. This kind of tactical scheduling by trainers is something worth bearing in mind when you are looking at a result and wondering why a particular dog was not in the field.

From a betting perspective, the difference matters too. BAGS results are the bread and butter of the licensed betting office — they fill the screens between horse racing fixtures and keep the tills ticking over. The odds on BAGS races are generally tighter, the markets thinner, and the form data sometimes harder to read because dogs move between tracks more frequently for these meetings. Open-night results, by contrast, tend to feature dogs with longer histories at the track, making form assessment more straightforward.

Category One Events in the Calendar

Twice a year the regular fixture pattern at Sunderland gives way to something bigger. The stadium is home to two Category One competitions — the highest tier of greyhound racing events in the GBGB calendar — and both of them draw entries from across the country.

The Premier Greyhound Racing Classic carries a winner’s purse of £20,000, making it one of the most valuable prizes available at any UK greyhound stadium outside of the English Greyhound Derby. The Classic is run over a series of heats and a final, and it attracts top-graded dogs from multiple tracks. When the Classic is on, the quality of racing at Sunderland jumps noticeably — these are animals running at or near their best, and the times they produce often become reference points for grading and form analysis for months afterward.

The ARC Grand Prix is the second Category One event, offering £12,500 to the winner. It is run over 640 metres — the middle distance at Sunderland — and has become the stage for some of the track’s most memorable performances. It was during the 2025 Grand Prix, held on Good Friday, that New Destiny set the current 640-metre track record of 38.79 seconds. That kind of moment is what elevates a fixture from routine to historic.

Both events are typically scheduled on open-racing nights, usually Fridays, and they generate the highest attendance figures of the year. If you are planning a first visit to Sunderland, timing it to coincide with either the Classic or the Grand Prix will give you the best possible introduction to what the track can produce. The exact dates shift from year to year, so checking the fixture list on the official site in advance is essential.

Outside of these two headline events, Sunderland also hosts occasional special fixtures — charity nights, holiday racing, and trial sessions for dogs moving up in grade. These do not carry Category One status, but they add variety to the calendar and sometimes produce surprising results worth noting for future form study.