In their first meeting at the Woodward, Damascus put a quick end to all speculation about whether he was a better—or at least sounder—horse than Ogden Phipps’s four-year-old Buckpasser ...

In return, Putin was presented with a Damascus steel sword. As the Kremlin’s press-service has said, the horse called Khadjibek (year of birth 2012) was the breed’s world champion in 2015 ...