RACING IN RUSSIA

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXIX, Issue 4745, 12 September 1935, Page 8

RACING IN RUSSIA

NOW VERY POPULAR. STATErOWNED HORSES. The old pure Bolsheviks hesitated before letting class brothers engage in the "unnatural rivalries" of the football field, writes A. T. Chorleston from Moscow to the "Daily Telegraph." They had no such scruples about horse-racing. By 1921 trotting events and by 1924 ordinary flat racing were again in full swing. With the opening of the summer season 900 horses are stabled round Moscow's unlovely by well-managed "hippodrome." Horses and course alike belong to the heavily-subsidised Central State of Horse Trust, which also controls ten other big courses and most of the leading stud farms in Russia and Russian Asia with racing stables attached. Every evening there is racing in Moscow. Every sixth day (Russia rests one day in six instead of our day and a-half in seven) a drab but good-humoured crowd of the real Russian stamp—stolid and easy-going once they escape politics—spend up to ten hours on end steadily betting small sums on State-owned horses at the State "tote" boxes.

Trotting, the principal sport, goes on all the year round, with brief gaps at changes of season.. For climatic reasons our ordinary flat racing only lasts a four months' summer season. This necessitates a different system of training. For the rest of the year the horses are kept at the racing stables of the State studs. Therefore, when racing in Moscow, they preserve their independent "stable character," with their own trainers and stable boys, and even their own stable jockeys; but all expenses during the actual racing season are paid by the Moscow course.

These horses —360 of them have already arrived for this season—are, of course, English thoroughbreds, although for experimental k purposes high-bred animals not pure bred are sometimes run against them. They race, alas, on a dirt track, round the outside of the trotting course, and the races are usually sandwiched in between trotting events.

The Central State Horse Trust has of recent years imported several hundred English thoroughbreds from France, Italy, Germany, and Poland—'none, I believe, directly from England. They never race these imported horses, but only their progeny. One of the likeliest three-year-olds here this year was sired by a winner of the Italian Derby. But although finely trained, they are obviously not quite up to British, French or American standards.

The Soviet Derby is usually run on August 6 for a prize of 50,000 roubles (about £500), which goes to the winning stable for "improving the life of the staff." There is also a so-called "trotting Derby," with a prze of 20,000 roubles, and about 50 smaller prizes annually.

I was taken round the immense stables by the Communist manager Of the course, a shrewd, stocky little fellow, about thirty. I asked this "party watch-dog" how his stable lads were recruited. He informed me, as a matter of principle, that he himself was a mill-hand. "Until when?" I asked. "Until sixteen," he answered with a grin. One thing struck me specially about those racing stables; they are obviously not show places. Unlike the Moscow "Metro.," they are not marble-lined; certainly.no tourist ever came to see them. Built economically of plain unglazed white brick

and rough wood, they have none of the finish of English racing stables, but they are quite good enough; clean, airy, with everything a happy horse needs. I The horse hospital, too, made a big impression on me. This again, is not a show place. No political chief could possibly derive any satisfaction from having it named after him. It is not /even a good building. But this externally shabby old stable encloses everything required to treat a sick or injured horse.