27 Facts About Phar Lap

Phar Lap was a New Zealand-born champion Australian Thoroughbred racehorse.

Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup, two Cox Plates, the Australian Derby, and 19 other weight-for-age races.

Phar Lap is universally revered as one of the greatest race horses of all time, not just in Australia but in the history of Thoroughbred horse racing.

Phar Lap won in a different country, after a bad start many lengths behind the leaders, with no training before the race, and he split his hoof during the race.

Phar Lap's mounted hide is displayed at the Melbourne Museum, his skeleton at the Museum of New Zealand, and his heart at the National Museum of Australia.

Phar Lap was sired by Night Raid from Entreaty by Winkie.

Phar Lap was a brother to seven other horses, Fortune's Wheel, Nea Lap, Nightguard, All Clear, Friday Night, Te Uira and Raphis, none of which won a principal race.

Phar Lap was a half-brother to another four horses, only two of which were able to win any races at all.

Phar Lap finished last in the first race and did not place in his next three races.

Phar Lap won his first race on 27 April 1929, the Maiden Juvenile Handicap at Rosehill, ridden by Jack Baker of Armidale, a 17-year-old apprentice.

Phar Lap took second in the Chelmsford Stakes at Randwick on 14 September 1929, and the racing community started treating him with respect.

Phar Lap won the Rosehill Guineas by three lengths on 21 September 1929, ridden by James L Munro.

From his win as a three-year-old in the VRC St Leger Stakes until his final race in Mexico, Phar Lap won 32 of 35 races.

Davis then had Phar Lap shipped to North America to race.

Phar Lap was shipped by boat to Agua Caliente Racetrack near Tijuana, Mexico, to compete in the Agua Caliente Handicap, which was offering the largest prize money ever offered in North America racing.

Phar Lap won in track-record time while carrying 129 pounds.

In 2000, equine specialists studying the two necropsies concluded that Phar Lap probably died of duodenitis-proximal jejunitis, an acute bacterial gastroenteritis.

In 2006, Australian Synchrotron research scientists said it was almost certain Phar Lap was poisoned with a large single dose of arsenic in the hours before he died, perhaps supporting the theory that Phar Lap was killed on the orders of US gangsters, who feared the Melbourne Cup-winning champion would inflict big losses on their illegal bookmakers.

Phar Lap said "In those days, arsenic was quite a common tonic, usually given in the form of a solution ", and suggests this was the cause of the high levels.

In December 2007, Phar Lap's mane was tested for multiple doses of arsenic which, if found, would point to accidental poisoning.

The find gave credence to Woodcock's deathbed admission in 1985 that Phar Lap may have been given an overdose of a tonic before the horse died in 1932.

Phar Lap's heart was remarkable for its size, weighing 6.2 kilograms, compared with a normal horse's heart at 3.2 kilograms.

In Luck's 1979 television series This Fabulous Century, the daughter of Walker Neilson, the government veterinarian who performed the first post-mortem on Phar Lap, says her father told her the heart was necessarily cut to pieces during the autopsy, and the heart on display is that of a draughthorse.

However the expression "a heart as big as Phar Lap" to describe a very generous or courageous person became a popular idiom.

Phar Lap was one of five inaugural inductees into both the Australian Racing Hall of Fame and New Zealand Racing Hall of Fame.

Phar Lap has been honoured with a $500,000 life-sized bronze memorial near his birthplace in Timaru, New Zealand, that was unveiled on 25 November 2009.

Phar Lap has several residential streets named after him in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.