Sport: The Pace of the Turtle

Since the great day when Aesop’s tortoise nosed out the over-confident hare, turtle racing had come a long way. Last week a 25-year-old terrapin named Arkansas Express ran away with Loyola University’s first turtle derby. He was bought in a fish market a month ago, and trained by pre-med students, who used Pavlov’s theory of the conditioned reflex. Main feature: the “gait-straightener”—a practice track with a picture of a heron on one side, a pike on the other (both are natural enemies of the turtle).

Put in the center of a ten-foot circle, he bounded out with a straight gait in 30 seconds flat, as 100 fans cheered. There were no rules governing the race: one contestant dropped dead of an overdose of adrenalin. Arkansas Express will be entered in turtledom’s Kentucky Derby, the sixth annual turtle trudge at the University of Detroit this week.