When Sprinters Were, Daily Racing Form, 1926-04-23

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When Sprinters Were By SAI.VATOK Thomas Hardy, the greatest of living F.ng-1 lish poets and novelists, now a very old man he is best known in the Inited States as the author of "Tcss of the Purbervilles," a great success on our stage as dramatized for, Mrs. Piske is also a man with great power.;; of irony and satire. Never aggressively, cheerful in any mood, he can be positively] gruesome when the fit is oniini to ox] bse to the light of day the futility, g-nerally; speaking, of the "so-called human race." Onej of his later volumes of poems he calls "Times Laughing Stocks," and in it are many pages on which he fairly withers-the , g nus homo with the quiet hut tremendous force of his indictment of it as a mere herd | of foolish, ignorant and malicious, when not ; positively vicious and unregenerate, male and female atoms, chasing each other about overj the planet in the vain, endeavor to get sonic-j where or be somebody. It is the immense and inescapable irony of existence that seems to Hardy above all I its typical quality and rereading some of his poems the other day I was struck by the applicability of some of his ideas to the turf as it at present exists: and. especially to the enormous amount of men, horses, material and money it absorbs, from which it is producing here in America, at least little but subjects for what he calls "times laughing stocks." For. after over a century and a half of effort, we have at length evolved a: race of horses which, if the systematic method employed in their exploitation is to; be accepted at its face value, is a mere herd | of sprinters, the great majority of which can with difficulty get a mile without stag-] gering home, and whose preferred distance is somewhere from six to seven furlongs. "O, lame and impotent conclusion ." ONCK MICH AD.MIItF.n. The ironical pari of it. to me. as a "per-1 sonal equation," inheres in the fact that I whereas it is today difficult for me to men- tion a sprinter except in terms, or at least j with the accent, of contempt, in the begin-! ning I was a great admirer of this type of race horse, took great interest in his doings and regarded him as one of the most brilliant members of the raclne: caste. If. at that period, anybody would have intimated that I would end up by regarding him as a nuisance and a s igma. I would have re- torted. perhaps with considerable vigor, that the idea was crazy. Put ne body can read the future, nor conceive what it may have :n store. In those days sprinting was a tid-bit. served as one of the confections of the turfmans banquet. Or, to change the simile, it was like a sparkling high-light 1 dashed in by an artist at the most telling, spot in his composition, to give the picture the final and irresistible allure. . Sprinting was to me absorbing when it was a mode of racing apart from the order of the day and offered as a divertissement, like the interval, let us say. in an opera devoted to the ballet. It was fascinating, glittering, thrilling— a brief interlude in the progress of the actual drama, used to give effect, color and animation and afforil a relief from the ti nsity of the plot and passion, the grandiose proportions, of the "big show." It was delightful to turn from a struggle of the titans, over a distance of, I ground, to the breathless rush of the sprinters, I in which speed, and speed only, was 1 the vehicle of display and the summum bo-ni:m. It exhiliarated, excited, thrilled. But when sprinting becomes the one great racing staple, and its monotonous grind the inevitable program, from Tampa to Tijuana. New Orleans to Toronto, and Latonia to Saratoga, one at last revolts. He feels like the unfortunate individual condemned to hear a flute player perennially practicing his .•cales. always the same scales, over and over again, until the impulse to commit murder or suicide becomes almost ungovernable How this transformation happened to occur is a subject that it would require a book, and not a small one. to cover adequately. Here it can only be sketched in the most lightly, with an indication, here and there, of whys and wherefors. It is now just about a half-century since what might be termed the "rise of the sprinter" began. Previous to that, except in two-ye-ar-old events and those which were confined to the old-fashioned "quarter-horse." races at less than a mile were virtually unknown at reputable courses. What I 1 I I 1 was the first "representative" sprinter to appear on the American turf, and what was his era. That honor, if honor it is. has been bestowed upon Rhadamauthus. a black horse foaled in ls?2, by Imported Leamington from Nemesis, by Imported I-clipse. Leamington. as is well known, was one of the greatest sin s of stayers ever brought over from Kngland. On the other hand, it was speed, not staying powers, that was the hall-mark of the family of Kelipse. son of Orlando. The story of Ithadamanthus is one of the traditions of our turf lore. How he fell into the hands of the Dwyer brothers, then the proprietors of a humble butcher shop in Brooklyn, having been condemned and discarded as unfit for "high society," and laid the foundation for their memorable after-career as turf magnates by his tremendous success in what were then the short -distance events of the Metropolitan turf. AN "OIMKPT LKSSON." Now. nothing succeeds like success, nor is anything a surer breeder of imitation. To all aspirants for the short cut to glory on the turf, the example of the Dwyers and the part that Rhadamauthus played in it, became the outstanding "object lesson" with a veritable "golden text." Thus began the demand for sprinters and for sprinting races, a movement which began at the bottom, veritably one initiated by the hoi polloi of the sport, but destined, in the end. to subvert and supersede all the policies, practices and ideals of its leaders and creators, to subdue them to its own interests and to bedeck them with its own colors. Year by year and decade by decade, men of the stamp or the order that had laid the foundation for the sport, built it up to a proud position, and, purely to gratify their own passion and with little thought of f nanoial reward, save as a side issue, brought into being the breed of horses which were the actors on the play, were forced into the background and passed from leadership into submissiveness. In their stead the purely commercial turfman began to increase and multiply. "In ■anthers there is strength." said the old-time copy book. And in a democracy, there is no strength outside them. With the regression of the turfman, who was also a sportsman, hs method-; and ideals were doomed. With the new men and the new times came the new methods, the be-all and end-all of which was not merely how to "get the: money," but how to get it in the quickest possible amy. The solution of this problem, on practical application, aras the sprint race. And that is the reason why today racing has become, to all intents and purposes, nothing but sprinting. rmUOMIMAHCE OP SPRINTS. So far as I am aware, no statistics are available showing the exact number of separate and Individual race horses that started on the American turf during 1!2.~ . or the total, or average, number of starts made by them. But within a period of seven years, the number of races contested has jumped over 200 per cent, for no farther back than 1! IS the total in this column was under 1.000. whereas in IMS it exceeded 12.000. It would require long and meticulously careful computation to ascertain the exact figures. but personally I have no doubt that in this gain of some S.000 races run. at least ninety per cent were at distances of less than a mile. This opinion is based upon continuous e.erutiny of the daily programs at all race tracks, as they appear in DAILY RACING FORM. I have headed these paragraphs with the caption. "When Sprinters Were." This is the day when sprinters API. "Simply that and nothing more." The exceptions are merely sufficient to establish the rule and j figure only as such. In the stretch of time that divides then from now. Ideas of what constitutes sprinting and sprinters have also undergone a change. Rhadamanthus. the first "king sprinter." was "up to something." upon Occasion at considerably over a mile. Nowadays a horse equal to anything like that is a real long-distance racer. In the long procession of sprinters that stood out conspicuously as "speed marvels" some truly wonderful horses base appeared. And distasteful as modern sprinting monotony has become to me. I often take pleasure in summoning up their figures. Perhaps later on I may throw some of them upon the screes*


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