Posted on 10/28/2006 9:32:06 PM PDT by FLOutdoorsman
THAT he is still causing a fuss more than 74 years after his death shows what a legend Phar Lap was. In the past few days, newspapers in Australia and elsewhere have reported on the extraordinary findings by scientists, who examined tiny hairs from the preserved remains of the antipodes' most famous racehorse, that was allegedly killed by American gangsters in April of 1932. I use the word antipodes advisedly: for all that he was a great Australian hero, Phar Lap was born in New Zealand.
Using the latest technology, scientists have found that Phar Lap ingested huge amounts of arsenic shortly before he died. Their immediate conclusion, which was taken up avidly by the Aussie press, was that 'Big Red', as the giant chestnut gelding was known, had indeed been murdered by the Mob, who were fearful of the damage that he would wreak on their illegal bookmaking operations.
In Australia, it is as if the authorities had found Shergar, caught the Great Train Robbers and solved the Jack the Ripper murders all in the same week. The Courier and Mail's headline read: "Nation stops for answer", while the Daily Telegraph in Sydney declared: "Official: Our greatest horse was poisoned". The Herald Sun led its front page with the simple message: "Phar Lap Poisoned", and added: "LIFE AND DEATH OF A LEGEND - SPECIAL REPORTS PAGES 4, 5, 6, 7".
Such was, and is, the status of the gelding that was, without doubt, one of the world's most amazing racehorses. He broke track records all over the place, and won 37 of 51 races, but when he travelled to North America, he died suddenly and in agony a few days after winning the continent's richest race, the Agua Caliente handicap, which was run near Tijuana, Mexico.
Foul play was suspected, and no wonder - a bookie had tried to shoot the horse in 1930 in the midst of a stunning run of 14 wins in succession, including Australia's biggest race, the Melbourne Cup. However, Phar Lap could have succumbed just as quickly to any malaise, ranging from colic to eating grass that had been sprayed with insecticide.
In life, Phar Lap was at first a big, awkward and frankly ugly specimen, and was covered in warts. But he blossomed into a massive and powerful animal, and in death, rightly, he was treated as an equine superstar. His outsize heart was presented to the Canberra Institute of Anatomy, his skeleton went back to New Zealand to a museum, and his stuffed hide can be viewed to this day in Melbourne Museum's Australia Gallery.
The hairs which provoked the latest outcry were taken from his hide. The government of the state of Victoria were so impressed that they have given the scientists who made the initial findings a grant of $A20,000 to permit further investigations in an attempt to ascertain, once and for all, how Phar Lap died.
But as the story emerged last week, it transpired that the culprits could have been the horse's trainers. Former stable staff testified that his first trainer, Harry Telford, and successor Tommy Woodcock fed Phar Lap a performance- enhancing potion, which contained arsenic. Their activities were perfectly innocent, as potions and tonics were all the rage in those pre-steroid days, but I suspect that a few citizens of Australia - a nation that absolutely abhors cheating or sledging opponents on a rugby or cricket field - will have been discomfited to learn that their hero could have been killed by the 1930s equivalent of EPO or nandrolone.
Damon Runyon wrote in a wartime newspaper column about an American serviceman on a tour of duty in Australia, who could not go into a bar without some native of Oz complaining: "You Yanks killed our Phar Lap!"
They may well have done, or was it the Australians themselves? Phar Lap's death remains a mystery, albeit one that should be solved soon by the wonders of science.
October surprise???
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