Am fond of Swaps, too! :> Such heart. And with his string of records at several distances, he must've given people a feeling something like watching Man o' War.
Have seen photos documenting Native Dancer's 29-foot stride -- Jolene Boyd includes them in her Thoroughbred Legends "Native Dancer" book. Believe they were taken in Kentucky, not long before the Derby. I looked for them in old Blood-Horse mags and found reference to it in April 1953.
Taking nothing away from the Dancer, I do wonder if 29 feet was his racing stride. Inspiration for that wondering comes from Raymond Woolf, Jr.'s "Secretariat" book. "Six days before the Preakness," Woolf writes, "Secretariat worked five eighths in a fast :57 2/5, and the distances between his hoof prints were measured. The longest stride was twenty-four feet, eleven inches.... It seemed almost mediocre compared to the great Native Dancer's stride of twenty-nine feet." But Dr. Manuel Gilman (quoted by Woolf, from a NYRA press release) made an interesting observation that I think also applies to Native Dancer and Man o' War:
"The big red colt...employs two different strides with equal facility, one long and the other short -- and the SHORT one was measured at the Maryland track. ... The distance-running type of horse is generally long in the body and so takes long strides, at least in theory. Sprinters, on the other hand, are generally more heavily muscled and short-coupled and take shorter strides. Secretariat is a most unusual horse. He's very heavily muscled and looks like a sprinter for that reason, but he also has the body length of the long striding horse. He's an all-purpose horse, a sprinter and a stayer -- and he uses the typical stride of each at different points in a race. All horses probably alter their stride in this way, but none [of his contemporaries ;>] to the successful extent that Secretariat does, and the way he accelerates is fantastic. At the time they measured his stride at Pimlico, he was obviously sprinting -- and so they were measuring his shorter stride. How much longer his long stride is I couldn't even begin to guess."
My hunch is that Native Dancer's 29-foot stride was measured during a gallop rather than a breeze, and that his racing-speed stride probably was in the 24-25 foot range, along with Sec and Man o' War. All of the 1920 newspapers I've seen that mention MoW's stride being measured in races place it at or slightly under 25 feet (measurements varying slightly between different parts of the race).
