GREAT HORSES

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 17, 21 January 1928, Page 10

GREAT HORSES

« AUSTRALIA'S BEST PAST AND PRESENT STERLING CHAMPIONS (Written for "The Post" by " Wayfarer.") A high racing authority in Australia resents the suggestion that Mr. H. A. Knight's Limerick of to-day is on the way towards becoming the equal of Mr. G. W. Greenwood's Gloaming of six or seven years ago, when the great son of The Welkin probably was at his best. "While Limerick has beaten our really good dorses by no more than narrow margins," this ardent admirer of the Australian-bred champion declares, "Gloaming, on the other hand, put to rout tho best of them and gained runaway victories that pronounced him the super horse. .. To say that Gloaming is Gloaming, and that we shall never see his like again, savours of blind bigotry. But although Limerick is a mighty horse, and one, to boot, who is improving with every new season on the Turf, he is, in our opinion, not yet comparable with Gloaming, the horse who could win over any distance from a half-mile to a mile and a half, could beat any horse, was never further out of a race than second in all his career, could win forty-seven out of his fiftyseven starts, earned £43,100 in stakes, and outlasted the strongest of his rivals and raced nntil he was nine years "old. Such horses are freaks." While it is unnecessary to accept this eloquent eulogy of "Australia's Best" at its face value, it must be conceded that up to the present time —with, it may be hoped, several seasons still to go —Limerick has not won his way to so high a pinnacle as the one occupied by Gloaming by the right of achievement. He is lighter .framed and lighter boned than tho older horse, and looks more of a stayer and less of a sprinter than docs his predecessor in the invasion of tho Australian Turf. It remains to bo seen if ho is of the same quality. OTHER CANDIDATES. But surely in looking for "Australia's Best" in racehorses, the search should not be confined to two geldings representing only the later developments of the Commonwealth Turf. As both Gloaming and Limerick are Now Zoalanders, the former by transfer as a yearling and the latter by breeding, it would be only fair to admit Carbine and Desert Gold, two great performers on both sides of the Tasman Sea, to the competition for tho impressive title. Carbine cannot be so.easily compared with Gloaming as Limerick can be, since their racing careers arc separated by more than a quarter of a century; but Desert Gold actually measured strides with the Welkin gelding in her declining years, and .it should not be difficult to deduce from their performances some idea of the validity of their respective claims to be regarded as "Australia's Best." In considering the length of time these three great performers continued to race it should be remembered that Gloaming was a gelding, that he was not raced as a two-year-old, and that at no time was he over-done or set an impossible task. Carbine, on the other hand, was raced earlier than a colt of his make-up should have been, and was set tasks for which he was not fully prepared. Nevertheless he ran through four seasons, winning the Melbourne Cup under the great burden of lOst 51b (a record still standing), the Champion Stakes twice, the Sydney Cup twice, and winding up his racing career with a stake balance of £22,520, a,sum that would have reached £64,561 at the present scale of added money. One would think that this mighty son of Musket, an,unparalled performer on tho Australian Turf and a distinguished sire in the Home Country, would not be easily deprived of the proud title of "Australia's Best." In the last number of that most delightful of all sporting volumes, "Famous Horses of the British Turf," it is shown that no fewer than seven of the twenty performers selected for distinction in 1927 are descended, in smaller or greater degree, either direct from Carbine or from his grandsiro Toxophilite. .Everyone knows, of course, that Carbine's son Spearmint won the Epsom Derby in 1906 and his grandson Spion Kop in 1920. AGE AND YOUTH. It would be quite wrong to assume that the respective merits of Gloaming and Desert Gold were definitely settled by their triple contest at the Taranaki and Egmont Meetings in the autumn of 1919. Desert Gold, then in her fifth season, had returned from a trip to Australia a more or less jaded mare, looking, at any rate, a good stone below her form of the previous year. Gloaming, on the contrary, seemed particularly bright and well, having after appropriating the Chelmsford Stakes and the Australian Jockey Club's Derby on the "other side," returned to New Zealand to win the Champion Stakes at Trentham, the New Zealand Derby at Riccarton, the Islington Plate i and Great Northern Derby at Ellerslie, and the Wellington Stakes and Kelburn I Plate on a second visit to Trentham. The meeting of the pair in the Taranaki Stakes was indecisive, Gloaming being momentarily entangled in the tapes at the barrier and failing in his effort to make up his lost ground. A week later in the Egmont Stakes the luck was the other way, Croesus, the only other starter, falling in front of Desert Gold and putting her out of her stride. After a day's postponement on account of rain the pair met finally in the Hawera Stakes over a mile, but the mare having gone off as the gelding came on the latter had things much his own way and won by a length and a half. Gloaming was rather better backed than Desert Gold in the Taranaki Stakes, the margin, however scarcely reflecting the differenco in the appearance of the two; but after the mare's success in the first event the former supporters of the gallant daughter of All Black rallied round their old love to the inevitable lightening of their pockets. A GREAT MARE. To realise what a really great mare Desert Gold was when at the top of her form one must go back to the records of her earlier performances. During her three-year-old season, which followed upon a very strenuous two-year-old career, she was not once beaten. Her successes included the Champion Plate, the Wellington Stakes, and North Island Challenge Stakes at Trentham, the New Zealand Derby, New Zealand Oaks, and Stead Memorial at Riccarton, the Islington Plate, Great Northern Derby, Great Northern Oaks, and Great Northern St. Leger at Ellorslie, and the Awapuni Gold Cup and Manawatu Stakes at Palmerston North. As a four-year-old she won tho Champion Plate and the Challenge Stakes again among several other wcight-for-ago races, and as a live-year-old, after winning the Champion Plate for the third time and the Stead Memorial for the second time, took her place in a big field for the Auckland Eacing Club Handicap with lOst 41b on her back and finiihed third, only half a length behind such doughty handicap opponents as Multiply and Cynic, to each of whom she was conceding close upon three stone. It was after that race, which she might have won but for the

wrenching of a plate, she should have been retired to the stud, where sho since has given promise of transmitting much of her speed and stamina to her progeny. Though she was sent to Australia after she had lost some of her early brilliancy she held her own creditably with the opposition she encountered there, and with a long list of good mares that can be recalled it seems safe to say she is the best of her sex that has raced in New Zealand. It certainly is arguable that at her best she was at any distance as good as Gloaming. MASTER OF THEM ALL. If the Australian authority intended to extend his search for the Commonwealth's best racehorse beyond the past decade, as seems probable since Gloaming, as equine genealogies run, belongs to another generation, then there are many champions of the long ago, other than Carbine, that might be pitted against Mr. Greenwood's gelding. But of the past and of the present, and, one may almost venture to say, of the future, there can be no other horse that will appeal to lovers of his species just as Carbine does. One feels privileged to have seen the great lanky, looselybuilt, bad-shouldered, soft-legged, shuffling-gaited yearling landed at Eiccarton, to have watched his breaking and training and gradual development, to have seen him win his four races in New Zealand, and to have hoard one early spring morning on the track the language in which Dan O'Brien apostrophised the handieapper who had allotted his cold 7st 61b in the Melbourne Cup, a weight never carried to victory in the big handicap till thirteen years later. Atrocious paintings of Carbine have been reproduced, and the story of his historic run in the Middle Park Plate has been mistold; but in "Racehorses in Australia" there is a picture of him as a six-year-old by that great artist Martin Stainforth, which presents "Old Jack" just as those who knew him intimately in New Zealand would expect him to grow. Great horses will come and go, both in the Commonwealth and the Dominion, but among those that can recall the years between 18S7 and 1892 there will bo only one best horso in Australasia.