Page 9 - THE SLOUGHI REVIEW SPECIAL ISSUE 7 B

T H E S L O U G H I R E V I E W 0 9

Not only is the racing sighthound – don't confuse it with the Borzoi, a long-haired
Russian sighthound, or with the Sloughi, a much less elegant and robust Arabian
sighthound – not only is the racing sighthound the most beautiful animal in the
world, but it is also the fastest: at the start of a race, a Greyhound is timed on the
stopwatch to travel 20 meters per second, a positively dizzying speed that the best

racehorses do not approach. The poor Sloughis, and in particular the Borzois, seem
to stop when they are made to race with English Greyhounds.

We say English because they have been bred in England for centuries: the pure breed
of racing sighthounds has been trained and supervised there for longer than the
racehorse breed itself. Our neighbours call them Greyhounds, and the exciting sport
in which they are used is called coursing; we will return shortly to this very great and
beautiful outdoor sport. For the moment we are talking about sighthound racing,
which is something else entirely.

Walking the competitors
In the photographs of the track, we see neither the artificial hare, nor the slightest trace of the groove
or gutter necessary, it seems, for the traction of some electric machine. This is because the English
device (which we presented on July 23, 1927) has been completely transformed here in an ingenious way
that we will explain, with supporting sketches, in our next issue.