THE WORLD OF SPORT

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 248, 18 October 1924, Page 39 (Supplement)

THE WORLD OF SPORT

(Continued from Page J.) THE TURF. At the age of seven Flint Jack made an attempt to win the important Evor Handicap of 1J miles at York for the i third year in succession (writes "Conitaur," your racing correspondent), but I Anno iJomini tells on horses as well as j men, and the gallant old fellow finished ; among the also-rans in a field of twenty, headed by the four-year-old Marvex, which is the only horse trained by Task at Wantage. Marvex finished in ft .remarkable triple dead heat a year ago at Windsor with Dumas and Dinkie, and since then he has given evidence :of being a very useful colt indeed. He ran third for fhe Manchester Cup a few months ago, and he might have been the winner of the Ascot HighWeight Stakes but for being almost knocked over by a falling horse. Those races were over a distance of 1J miles, and when he won a £1000 Breeders' Plate at Nottingham over li miles in August, the general opinion j was that that was his beat distance. The only doubt in his case as regards the Ebor was whether he would "'get' , the course, but he quickly settled that, and, as a matter of fact, came in an easy winner by three lengths. A furlong from home Mr. James White's Norseman —a well-backed candidate—was level with him, but this grey horse has ever had a reputation for being a poor finisher, and he proved no exception on the present occasion. He collapsed at the point when an extra effort would have made all the difference between victory and defeat, and Marvex was left to stroll in alone. Lord Derby's Ceinturon, at 20 to 1, occupied the third place, and along with Flint Jack in the ruck was the favourite Hfisl —a stable companion of Scullion, the Ascot Stakes winner—and other Cesarewitch horses in Bellman, Despote, (Nottingham, Apron (a stable companion of Ceylonese), Shippon, and Henry the Seventh. Furious, the old Lincolnshire hero, is quite tired of the game these days, and once again he refused to strike off with the rest, being absolutely left at the post and taking no part in the Tace. I doubt whether we saw the winner of the Cesarewitch in this Ebor field. Cottingham had been an extremely heavilybacked horse in the North, but it transpired that he had developed a. cough a week or two before the race, and that, of course, might have been responsible for his inept display. He is a perfectly bred horse by Lemberg— Rosedrop, a Derby winner and an Oaks winner respectively, and he showed recently at Pontefract meeting that lie has the ability when well by cantering away with a 1J mile race. Jazz Band, a Cesarewitch fancy, on the strength of his clean-cut victory in the Northumberland Plate, declined the Ebor engagement, but he is due to compete over two miles at Manchester, and I shall be able to say more about his chances when I have seen him run there. Mumtaz Mahal has entirely re-estab-lished herself in the affections of the public. You may remember she was run out of her distance at the early part of the season, and most people believed that her failures then would affect her adversely for good, even when attempting to assert her old superiority over five-furlong tracks. However, she was brought out at Goodwood and she won, though not in the electrifying way of her two-year-old days. It was left to the York meeting to prove that she was still the "flying grey"—the fastest horse in training over short cuts. She was opposed by good horses like Top Gallant and Drake, but she made they look "poor fish,"' simply cantering in to the typical roar of a Yorkshire crowd. It was said that she will be Tetired to the stud after this victory but now that she has definitely placed herself on the former pedestal there is no reason why she should not li<> allowed to pick up a few more valuable prizes in similar easy fashion. The Aga Khan was not so fortunate with his St. Leger horse, Salmon Trout. The latter was saddled at Hurst Park in a race which it was thought he could not very well lose; in fact, in what was regarded as merely an exercise spin in his St. L«ger preparation. A big surprise, however, was in store. The race was run at a pace which ought to have brought his stamina into full play, and, although Victor Smyth, his jockey, rode with tremendous power from the distance when delivering his challenge, he could not peg back Watford, who. by the way, is also a St. Leger candidate, but until this success only looked upon as having a bare outside chance. The defeat seriously prejudices the chances of Salmon Trout for the last of the classics, naturally, and it is certain that he will not be anything like a 4 to 1 horse for that race now.