Sport: Horseshoe Race

Few U. S. racing fans know that England's famed Derby, prototype of all U. S. derbies, is run on grass instead of dirt, over a U-shaped track instead of an oval, up-&-down-hill instead of on the flat and over a distance of i| miles instead of i|. But every U. S. racing fan knows that the English Derby is the most famed horse race in the world, is the basis for one of the three Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes held each year and that some $4,000,000 of U. S. money is gambled annually on the Derby lottery.

Last week more than 500,000 Britons gathered around the horseshoe course at ancient Epsom Downs, 15 miles from London—and perhaps 100,000,000 more the world over tuned in on their radios—for the 160th running of The Derby. In the field of 27 three-year-olds, the popular favorite was Lord Rosebery's Blue Peter, a chestnut colt who few weeks before had won the Two Thousand Guineas, first of the season's Big Three races for three-year-olds.† Babbling bookmakers, taking hard-earned bobs from farmers, charwomen, clerks, winked slyly under their bowler hats. A notorious Derby jinx had plagued the Rosebery silks ever since 1905 when the present Earl's father, onetime Prime Minister of England, won his third and last Derby.

When last week's Derby was over, the bookmakers were a gloomy lot. Blue Peter had finished four lengths ahead of the field, had cost them more than $5,000,000. But there never was a more popular victory. Leading his colt to the winner's circle, Albert Edward Harry Meyer Archibald Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery, grinned from ear to ear, told reporters that the silks his jockey wore in the race had belonged to his father, had been discovered in an old trunk during house-cleaning a few weeks before.

First favorite to win The Derby since 1935, Blue Peter rewarded his owner with $52,000, a gold cup and a Cheshire cheese, put a few shillings into the pockets of millions of British workmen and brought modest fortunes ($140,000 each) to the two U. S. citizens who held Sweeps tickets on Blue Peter.