But if it
is hard to bring a horse to this culminating point of training, it is
still more difficult to keep him there, even for a period of a few
days. Training has been compared to the sides of a triangle: when one
has reached the apex one must perforce begin to descend. It being,
then, impossible that the animal should support for any length of time
the extreme tension of his whole organism that perfect training
supposes, it but very rarely happens that the horse prepared according
to this system--for the French Derby, for example--can be maintained in
such a condition as to enable him to win the Epsom Derby or the Grand
Prix de Paris. We have heretofore referred to the reaction against this
practice of excessive training, and to the efforts of Henry Jennings in
the direction of a reform--efforts which within the last few years have
been crowned with great success.
But we must now return to the Grand Prix. An invalid who had been
forbidden by his doctor to read the newspapers for several months, and
who should chance to make his first promenade on the Boulevards on the
eve of the Grand Prix, would know at a glance that something
extraordinary was about to happen.
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