Back in the barn, the help call Calumet Farm's Coaltown "the Goose"; he has a way of outstretching his long, thin neck when he runs. On St. Valentine's Day at Hialeah Park last week, the Goose flew as he had never flown before. Flashing by the seven-furlong marker in 1:21 1/5 (world-record time), Coaltown was ten lengths in front and still pulling away. At the mile, stop watches caught him in 1:34 1/5 (a shade faster than Equipoise's world record set at Arlington Park in 1932).
Coaltown kept going, his jockey sitting as motionless in the saddle as a park policeman. At the finish of the mile-and-an-eighth race, the handsome bay stallion had equaled another world record—the 1:47 3/5 that Indian Broom hung up at Tanforan in 1936. Jockey Eldon Nelson dismounted, stared at the fractional times posted on the odds board and exclaimed: "Gosh almighty."
Momentarily, Coaltown had stolen the thunder of his famed stablemate, Citation, who was in his stall convalescing from an ankle ailment. But one man, shrewd Ben Jones, insisted that Coaltown still belonged in Citation's shadow. Said Trainer Ben, who knows all there is to know about both horses: "Citation would have whipped him if he had been in there . . . Citation can catch any horse he can see."
Other winners last week:
¶At California's Santa Anita, in a ground fog that hid the field from sight part way down the back stretch, Kentucky-owned Old Rockport came from behind to win the $100,000 Santa Anita Derby. The most exciting thing about Old Rockport's victory: his mutuel price, a fat $68.10 for $2.
¶At the Palais de Sport in Paris, 19-year-old Harvard Freshman Dick Button gave twelve rivals a lesson in the art of figure skating, won the world's championship for the second year in a row. The women's champion, successor to the throne vacated by Canada's Barbara Ann Scott (now a pro): Czechoslovakia's winsome, 17-year-old Alena Vrzanova.