THE SECRET OF STAYING POWER 



By Dr. W. J. STEWART McKAY 



THE ambition of every man that breeds racehorses is to produce a good 

 stayer. That this is a difficult matter is made evident by the large 

 number of horses entered for the Derby and St. Leger and the few 

 that run. 



Therefore the question is naturally asked : Why cannot all horses 

 run a distance? The answer is that all horses can run a distance; it's the time 

 they take that is the important point. 



In dealing with the questions relating to "staying," we must take into 

 consideration distance, time, and weight. We must try and find out the 

 difference between the horses that can sprint six furlongs in 1.12 and the 

 horses that can go two miles in 3.24, and ask how they differ from the horses 

 that can go 80 miles from sunrise to sunset. 



If a number of racing men and breeders of racehorses were to gather 

 round a ring, and five horses — say, Soultline, Prince Foote, Woorak, Desert 

 Gold and Poitrel — were brought into the ring, would it be possible, if the 

 onlookers did not know the horses or their pedigree — would it be possible, I 

 ask — to pick out the real stayers? Could a good judge tell that Woorak could 

 just get a mile, and that Prince Foote, who was about the same size and build, 

 could stay all day? Could a good judge say that Soultline could not stay a 

 mile? and tell that Desert Gold, the champion of her day, was no champion 

 once she was asked to go much more than a mile and a half? I doubt very much 

 whether any judge could place these horses in the true order of their staying 

 powers by merely inspecting them. The late Andrew Town, who may be 

 regarded as one who knew everything that was to be known about the points 

 of a horse, once said to me that had he seen Carbine with a rough coat in a 

 country sale-yard that he would not have rushed to buy him. 



If judges were able to tell the future of racehorses by their conformation, 

 then yearlings that are sold at 1,500 guineas would not be such consistent 

 failures. Let us never forget that the father of English racehorses, the 

 immortal Eclipse, was sold as a yearling for less than a hundred guineas; yet 

 he was the ancestor of Sceptre, who was sold for I 0,000 guineas as a yearling, 

 and the ancestor of Flying Fox, who fetched 39,375 guineas at public auction. 



What, let us ask, is the secret of Staying Power? 



We may say at the outset that all the horses that we have mentioned 

 above had the requisite bone and muscle. Soultline and Woorak could each 

 have carried a sixteen-stone man without turning a hair, and the same could 

 have been said of Desert Gold. While, then, we must grant that a given horse 

 must have the proper development of bone and muscle, this development 

 must be of a particular pattern. This, of course, is obvious; a Clydesdale has 

 far more muscle and bone than any racehorse, but the type of muscle is of 

 no use for speed, though suitable for endurance, and we shall see later on 

 that endurance is a very different thing to staying power. Mere size is not 

 the secret, since some of the finest-looking horses ever seen at Randwick have 

 been non-stayers — Machine Gun, Malt King and Tangalooma, for instance. 

 But it is because size so largely influences one's mind that high prices are 

 given for well-grown colts in the hope that they will prove "Derby colts." If 

 we study the history of the evolution of the racehorse we shall find some 

 justification for this idea, for the present-day horse is a bigger animal than he 

 was in former days. While the average racehorse nowadays, among the best 

 horses, would be over 16 hands, we find, if v/e go back to 1745, that 15.2 

 (the height of Sampson) was considered almost gigantic. Captain Hayes 



