Word: hambletonian
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Horses not only had ideal attributes in this scheme of things, they also made plausible heroes. The great example is Stubbs' prosaically titled Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800. Hambletonian, winner of both the St. Leger and the Doncaster Gold Cup in 1796, belonged 3 to a rich and deep-gambling young baronet named Sir Henry Vane-Tempest. In 1799 Vane-Tempest put him up against Diamond, another star horse, for a purse of 3,000 guineas. (At the time, a farmer's laborer might have made the equivalent of five guineas a year.) The match drew the biggest crowd...
...grandest in structure and, to modern eyes, the most suggestive. That immense, glossy brown frame of the horse, floating across one's whole field of vision, has the compulsive power of a dream image. In the interest of decorum, Stubbs left out the wounds and weals on Hambletonian's flanks, but his sympathies remained with the animal: white slaver flecks his mouth, the ears lie back flat, and the pink tongue lolls in the aftermath of exhaustion. The creature is attended, none too reverently, by brown pragmatic dwarfs. One cannot imagine that a more rhetorical horse...
...Illinois town (pop. 6,691), harness racing fans could even forget the aura of scandal that periodically haunts the sport-such as last June's scandal at Yonkers Raceway, which involved an amazingly low Exacta payoff, indicating a betting coup. But here, at the 46th running of the Hambletonian, no betting was allowed or ever had been by long tradition. The U.S.'s most prestigious race for standardbreds, and the middle leg of the Triple Crown for three-year-old male trotters,*the Hambo was a reminder of the luster that once belonged to a sport redolent with...
...horse race, the Hambletonian is an exacting test of both speed and endurance. The winning trotter must take two out of as many as four heats, run an hour apart around the one-mile clay track. This year only four of the nine entries figured to have a chance of capturing the coveted trophy and top prize of $64,885 out of the $129,770 total purse. Two of the early favorites were Hoot Speed and Speedy Crown, half-brothers sired by the co-holder of the mile world record, Speedy Scot. Hoot Speed was supposed to have the necessary...
...Pride as a yearling on a Pennsylvania farm in 1966 and purchased the colt for $20,000. Last year the trotter won a record $222,923 and turned in the fastest mile clocking (1 min. 58 2/5 sec.) ever achieved by a juvenile. Dancer is carefully pointing toward the Hambletonian, the U.S.'s most prestigious trotting race, on Aug. 25; hence he has raced the horse only lightly. Even at that, the colt won all four of his starts and $106,886-$83,373 at Roosevelt last week...