Hard-Luck Horses

Absorbing to horse race followers is the perennial question of which is the fastest three-year-old. Almost as absorbing this year has been the question of which candidate for this honor has been most outrageously cheated of it by misfortune.

First and most obvious candidate for the championship was Joseph E. Widener's Brevity, whose dam is Ormanda and whose sire is either Chance Shot or Sickle. As equivocal as his paternity, Brevity won the Florida Derby in record time, then, odds-on favorite, he ran second in the Kentucky Derby and the Withers. His admirers excused his failures to win by the fact that he was jostled at the start of both races. Winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness was Morton L. Schwartz's Bold Venture. Bold Venture last fortnight retired for the season with a bowed tendon. No favorite of fortune has been Granville. In the confusion at the start of the Kentucky Derby, William Woodward's bay colt lost his jockey. As though this were not hard luck enough for one horse, Granville lost the Preakness, the Wood Memorial and the Suburban Handicap by almost imperceptible margins, each time after being ahead in the stretch. Ogden Phipp's White Cockade won the Withers. A week later he too was laid up, with bad knees.

If the Kentucky Derby most nearly approaches the Epsom Derby as a spectacle, the Belmont Stakes, run at 1 1/2miles and, judged by the blood lines of its winners, the most aristocratic U. S. race, most nearly approaches it as a test of three-year-olds. Because all the hard-luck horses who were sufficiently fit to function were entered in it, last week's Belmont drew a record crowd of 35,000. Bookmakers made Brevity favorite at 6-to-5.

Like most major U. S. tracks Belmont Park has a camera which automatically photographs the finish of every race. Last week, after the Belmont Stakes, officials studied the photograph of the finish for five minutes, finally revealed the name of one more hard-luck horse. He, John Hay Whitney's Mr. Bones, had finished second by a whisker to Granville. Favorite Brevity was fifth.

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