New record set at Fair this year

A horse set a new mile record during the races at the 2021 Neshoba County Fair.

Kenneth Johnson of Texas is the owner of Speedlin who set the new record with a time of 1 minute and 56 seconds flat for the mile on Friday, July 30. StephFon Mitchell was the rider, said Bud Dees, race official. 

“That is a fast time for a half-mile track. Just smoking,” Dees said. “That's going to be hard to beat.”

Mitchell and Speedlin set the time during the Morris Therrell Memorial Invitational Race, the championship race that caps off the week’s slate of races.

Dees said the previous record was set by a horse from Mississippi about four years ago at the Fair with a time of 1 minute and 57.3 seconds. 

Dees said another horse from Texas managed to shave one second off of that time earlier in the week and would have been submitted as the record breaker if Speedlin had not broken it on Friday.

Dees reported a good slate of races during Fair week. Horse racing was canceled that Monday, July 26, for the first time in at least two decades due to heavy rains leaving dangerous and muddy conditions on the race track.

Dees was one of the race coordinators who made the call to cancel the races. He said he does not remember the races being canceled in recent memory.

“It was just too wet and too muddy,” Dees said at the time. “It was a call we had to make not a call I wanted to make.”

Jerome Donald of Philadelphia, a longtime racing horse owner, said they have not canceled a race this decade. “It’s been about 20-25 years, they canceled a race…” Donald said.

Former jockey Dewayne Clair said he remembers a past race that was held in a blinding rainstorm. 

“I can’t remember the last time it was canceled. I remember racing one year and I couldn’t even see and we still raced,” said Clair of Cabin 919.

Races continued on Tuesday and lived up to Dees’ claim that the horses would be running “lightning fast.”

Two jockeys were injured on Sunday, July 25. They were OK, Dees said. One of the horses started bucking which threw the rider off and knocked off another rider shortly after they left the gate on the backstretch. One was transported to the hospital and the other suffered only a scratch on his arm.