Sport: St. Edward of Lexington

(See front cover)

At Havre de Grace, Md., last week, Mrs. Isabella Dodge Sloane's long-striding, brown colt Cavalcade thundered first to the wire to snatch the Shenandoah Purse ($1,000 added).

At Jamaica, L. I. three days later, her big colt High Quest finished a length in front of the field, J. H. Louchheim's Speedmore coming second and Mrs. Payne Whitney's Spy Hill third in the Wood Memorial Stakes ($5,000 added).

Same day at Havre de Grace, in the Chesapeake Stakes ($7,500 added), speedy Cavalcade clipped 2/5 sec. off the track record, won handily from Mrs. Frank J. Heller's Agrarian and Alfred G. Vanderbilt's Discovery.

Exciting as these performances were for rich, socialite Mrs. Sloane, hospitalized in Manhattan from a hip injury sustained while bathing at Palm Beach last winter, their importance lay in the fact that they rang down the curtain on the preliminary spring races for 3-year-olds. All weather-vanes on all U. S. racing stables now pointed abruptly toward Louisville, Ky. Thither was shipped in padded motor vans and horse Pullmans every 3-year-old filly, colt and gelding in the land worth its oats. There, at Churchill Downs this week, the nation's 1934 racing season would formally open with the 60th annual running of the Kentucky Derby.

The Race. The Kentucky Derby is not the oldest U. S. horse race. Saratoga's Travers Stakes was first run in 1864. The Derby, with its added money reduced this year from $50,000 to $30,000, does not offer the richest stakes. More lucrative for horse owners are the Belmont Futurity (between $80,000 and $90,000) and the Belmont Stakes (some $60,000). Better fields of older horses are to be seen on many a track, and there are those who believe that the Belmont Stakes, run in June by a slightly more mature and smaller selection of horses, offers a more distinguished group of 3-year-olds than the Derby. But the Kentucky Derby is more than a horse race. It is a U. S. institution. If you have been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and to Louisville on Derby Day, you have celebrated two of the country's greatest fiestas.

The man who is responsible for making the Derby the racing classic of the American continent also has the distinction of having seen every Derby ever run. In 1875, 14-year-old Matt Winn sat in his father's grocery wagon and watched Aristides win the race. Grocery Boy Matt Winn became Matt Winn, merchant tailor of Covington, Ky. Twenty years ago, Tailor Matt Winn became Colonel Matt J. Winn, racetrack manager. In 1914 he upped the Derby's purse, steadily began to ballyhoo the race into a social and sporting extravaganza. Now, 73, Colonel Winn as president of the American Turf Association operates not only Churchill Downs at Louisville, but Latonia, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, as well as Lincoln Fields and Washington Park outside Chicago.