A Racetrack Legend

By Russ Laher

February 7, 2003

There once was a man named Mr. Faste, who was a fanatic about horse racing. In fact, he even dreamed of owning his own race horse that would one day win the Santa Anita Derby and, ultimately, the Triple Crown. He didn’t have enough money to buy a race horse, but his acquaintance, Mr. Slowe, who had plenty of money but was a cautious investor, reluctantly agreed to be his partner in the enterprise. Together they purchased a fine Arabian stallion.

Mr. Faste informed Mr. Slowe that tomorrow they would hold some trial runs to benchmark the horse’s speed around the track. Mr. Slowe, who didn’t know much about horse racing, was aghast over risking his portion of the investment in trial runs. He thought “Why, what if the horse gets injured? We’d lose our investment.”

So, unbeknownst to Mr. Faste, Mr. Slowe decided to buy another horse to use in the trial runs so that they could save their prize steed for the actual race. Mr. Slowe spent the day looking for a suitable horse, and by the day’s end finally found a dealer who would give him a good price. Now the dealer was somewhat disreputable, Mr. Slowe was myopic, and it was getting dark. The dealer took advantage of this and sold Mr. Slowe an animal that was crippled – it had only three legs!

This Mr. Slowe did not discover until next morning when he started the trial runs. But to make the most of a bad situation, he decided to continue the trial runs with the crippled animal anyway.

When Mr. Faste arrived at the track about an hour later, he was stunned at what he saw. “What are you doing Mr. Slowe?” Mr. Slowe told him that he planned to scale the run time of the three-legged horse by 3/4 to give an estimate of the run time of a normal horse. To which Mr. Faste replied: “You can’t compare a race horse to a normal horse, so why would you compare a crippled horse to a race horse? Moreover, that animal you bought is a donkey, not a horse, and you, Mr. Slowe, are an ass!”