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. ■ ■ • ■ i LAME STEPS MEAN NOTHING Xalapa Clown Favors Left Foreleg, but Works Brilliantly — Sire Was Affected the! Same Way;. LOUISVILLE, Ky., April 28.— The lame steps which Xalapa Clown takes as he hobbles on to the track at Churchill Downs where he is propping for the sixty-fifth Kentucky Derby a week from Saturday, calls to mind his illustrious sire, Eternal, when that son of Sweep was- training for the same race at the same track twenty years ago. Eternal was never a real sound horse although he raced brilliantly to win nineof his eighteen engagements and placed second in five others. Perhaps the most memorable race of his career was his match with Billy Kelly which the son of Sweep won by a narrow margin after a bruising duel. The match was staged at Laurel,, and it virtually carried with it the juvenile championship of that year. When Eternal reached his three-year-old year he came to Kentucky well in advance of the Derby and observers could not help but notice that the J. W. McClelland racer was not the soundest horse pointing for the Churchill Downs feature. In spite of his sen-sative forelegs, Eternal fairly burned up the track in his Derby trials. He was soundly beaten in the race, for which he was favorite, but that set-back was attributed more,-to the heavy condition of the track than to his fragile underpinning.. The Derby that year was won by Sir Barton with Billy Kelly second. Going beyond Eternal, such an able herself man as Roscpe Goose, former jockey, recalls that Eternals dam, Hazel Burke, was similarly afflicted although she was a useful racing tool. Xalapa Clown, campaigned very lightly as a two-year-old when he won his only three engagements, has favored his left foreleg all of this year but the ailing member does not seem to dull his speed for several of his trials here have been of near-sensational order.
