TOD SLOAN 



jockey should allow his horse to be " pocketed," but 

 on occasions there is really nothing much against this 

 if a boy is alert enough to get out of it. It is difficult 

 sometimes to discover a horse's best distance — so much 

 depends on how he is ridden. Tliere have been so 

 many hundreds of cases where sprinters have developed 

 into good two-mile hurdlers, and on round courses 

 with careful handling many animals which are 

 assumed to be quite incapable of staying a mile 

 would do so if absolute patience were shown by their 

 riders. 



Failures with regard to a horse getting a distance 

 he is capable of are attributable to various causes, 

 chief of which is lack of knowledge of pace ; and here 

 I might perhaps be excused for putting in an extract 

 from a speech made by Lord Durham at the Gimcrack 

 Dinner in December 1898. 



" Another favourite instruction was ' Get 

 off well and pull your horse at the back of 

 someone else's heels.' No doubt this style of 

 riding had caused numerous falsely won races. 

 It was for that reason that he welcomed the 

 visit of Sloan to this country. Sloan had 

 taught English jockeys that they ought not 

 to pull their horses about in races and waste 

 their energies. He hoped English jockeys 

 would pardon him for saying that he con- 

 sidered that excessively few of them had any 

 tolerable idea of what pace meant, and they 

 seemed to ignore the very elementary rule that 

 the horse which could cover the allotted dis- 

 tance in the shortest time would win the race. 

 He considered that Sloan's reason of success 

 over our jockeys was that he was such a good 



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