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GELDINGS AND CLASSICS • Australian Writer Questions Wisdom of Barring Unsexed Horses. ♦ Points Out Tendency of Such Rulings to Result in Perpetuating Worthless Blood Lines. • ■ The question of barring geldings from stake events has always been a subject of sharp dissension among turfmen. An interesting discussion of the subject is contained in the following article by Pilot, which is reprinted from the Sydney Referee: It has been suggested that for the benefit of the "improvement of the breed of horses," geldings should again be barred from the Australian Jockey Club Derby. Admittedly the Derby should be won by a horse likely to do something in that direction, but the race has more than once gone to a colt that, on subsequently being sent to the stud, would not have attracted good mares even if his services were offered free. In racing, as in many other things, the ideal and real are widely different, and it is to be hoped that, with our racing legislators, common sense will continue to prevail, and there will be no alteration in the conditions of the Australian Jockey Club Derby. DAGGER OF POOH STALLIONS. Far better that the Australian Jockey Club or Victoria Derby should be won a couple of times in fifty years by geldings, than that Australia should bt overrun with indifferent stallions. And that would be the inevitable result. Our yearling sales are becoming huge affairs. Nearly !00 youngsters will be offered at Randwick this autumn, tlie majority being colts and geldings. To exclude geldings froai the Derby would practically force all breeders to leave their colts entire. They could not afford to send them up for sale as geldings, even though they were quite aware it would be for the ultimate good of some. Their prices would suffer if they did. Nor would the buyers of the colts be anxious to have them gelded. As two-year-olds they would race as colts, and. even if they did not show form, their owners, fearful of throwing away the chance of winning a 0.100 stak. — it may shortly be 0.000 — would l.-avc tii.-m entire until th -y were three, in the hope they might improve. BIF1 KRKNT IV PK.VCTIfi:. If they were failures at that age their owners should, according to theory, have them gelded. But in ptacti.-e it might be different. They would probably keep them entire, in the belief they would obtain a few more pounds lor them as stallions than as gildings. Alter being sold they would drift into the country and, though duffers as race horses, their pedigrees would assure them a certain amount of stud patronage at low fees. Assuming that the exclusion of geldings from the Australian Jockey Club Derby caused an addition of only twenty stallions yearly to the number that would be left entire In ordinary circumstance*, that would be 100 in five years. Some might make desirable sires, but it would be the rever.-e with much the greater number, and Australias bloodstock would not be improved. In the way of stallions, Australia is a dumpiiig-grcund for a. deal of Knglish rubbish, and I cannot see that it would he for the benefit of our thoroughbred stock it encouragement were given to the increase of undesirable stallions of our own breding. In South Africa many years ago geldings were excluded from the South African Derby, and cue of the Johannesburg Turf Clubs principal two-year-old races. In a few yean the increase of indifferent stallions in that Country was so directly traceable to that altered conditions of those races that they were again opened to geldings. .A
