La Vraie Reine (1848)

Ask members about Thoroughbred lineage and other related information.

Moderators: Roguelet, WaveMaster, Jessi P, Lucy

steward
Allowance Winner
Posts: 492
Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:28 pm

La Vraie Reine (1848)

Postby steward » Thu Feb 27, 2014 7:18 pm

La Vraie Reine.

Checking her actual printed record and other older sources, I could not reconcile it with the "legend" that is online and repeated wherever it appears.

According to legend, she had an 11-race win streak of heat races in which she won every heat.

But, according to the proper set of American Turf Registers in my hands, she only raced in 1851 and 1852. She, indeed, won all of her first nine races (everyone of them was two heats apiece), until meeting defeat on April 9, 1852 but only after winning the first heat there also:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ ... nge&page=1

I have searched high and low to find any other races, but without success. I have tried the free and pay newspaper archive sites, but no other hits materialized. La Vraie Reine seemed to have raced only in the South, where good newspaper coverage was the norm and which is very accessible online. She was VERY high profile in her day, and it is doubtful that a hidden race exists, imo.

Unless I can find some other evidence to the contrary, I will assume that she had only the ten races total. Any information otherwise is very welcome.

User avatar
Pan Zareta
Breeder's Cup Winner
Posts: 2074
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:55 am
Location: west TX boonies

Postby Pan Zareta » Tue Mar 04, 2014 9:29 am

There are a few other 19th century notables whose total number of starts as usually cited by later sources do not quite equal their number of starts as reported in the ATR. I usually just pencil in the fact of the discrepancy and move on. Imo, there were simply too many meetings that didn't get reported in the ATR, but did get reported in other contemporaneous publications, to draw firm conclusions as to number of starts from the ATR alone.

steward
Allowance Winner
Posts: 492
Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:28 pm

Postby steward » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:59 pm

What you say is true about meetings or races not being reported to the sporting publications who kept track of such data and compiled them in annuals. I know, because I have discovered such races myself, even for famous horses. The sporting publications even complained in print about not receiving data from the various racing secretaries. (I suspect some of it was due to laziness, some due to lack of enthusiasm after a financially ruinous meeting just completed, and most the rest due to the failure of the postal system.)

That being said, in my opinion, a greater source of error (once the calendar turned into the 1850s or so) was periodic compilation goofs later done by the publishers. 10/20/30 years after the fact, they wrote articles about famous horses based upon a quickie research through old records. They resulted in a parent story that was later repeated ad infinitum by later authors, who did no/little double-checking themselves. Stats just kept being handed down to the next generation of racing reporters.

I suspect that some of the "parent" authors were unfamiliar with older terminology, or did not understand the varying shorthand protocols that the racing annuals used in their indices. (I suspect that some faulty compilations were done by simply counting the index entries for some horses, while presuming that each entry represented a race actually run; understandable for a person under a publication deadline.)

In the case noted above, she ran in an era when reporting from the better racetracks was pretty reliable. I'd be surprised if someone today would come up with a couple of new entries for a horse that received expert coverage in her day. I put this out in the hope that I might be wrong. :D