[1][8] The name Phar Lap derives from the common Zhuang and Thai word for lightning: ฟ้าแลบ [fáː lɛ̂p], literally 'sky flash'.

[15] Sydney trainer Harry Telford persuaded American businessman David J. Davis to buy the colt at auction, based on his pedigree.

[16] Although standing a winning racehorse at stud could be quite lucrative, Telford gelded Phar Lap anyway, hoping the colt would concentrate on racing.

He won his first race on 27 April 1929, the Maiden Juvenile Handicap at Rosehill, ridden by Jack Baker of Armidale, a 17-year-old apprentice.

Phar Lap took second in the Chelmsford Stakes at Randwick on 14 September 1929, and the racing community started treating him with respect.

In the three races that he did not win, he ran second on two occasions, beaten by a short head and a neck, and in the 1931 Melbourne Cup he finished eighth when carrying 10 st 10 lb (150 pounds (68 kg)).

Telford did not agree with this decision and refused to go, so Davis, who along with his wife traveled to Mexico with him, brought Phar Lap's strapper Tommy Woodcock as his new trainer.

[21] From there, the horse was sent to a private ranch near Menlo Park, California, while his owner negotiated with racetrack officials for special race appearances.

Early on 5 April 1932, the horse's strapper for the North American visit, Tommy Woodcock, found him in severe pain and with a high temperature.

In 2000, equine specialists studying the two necropsies concluded that Phar Lap probably died of duodenitis-proximal jejunitis, an acute bacterial gastroenteritis.

In April 2008, an 82-page handwritten notebook belonging to Telford and containing recipes for tonics given to Phar Lap in the days before swabbing was sold by a Melbourne auction house.

Kempson analysed six hairs from Phar Lap's mane at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.

[30] In October 2011 the Sydney Morning Herald published an article in which a New Zealand physicist and information from Phar Lap's strapper state that the great horse was never given any tonic with arsenic and that he died of an infection.

[31] Said Putt, "Unless we are prepared to say that Tommy Woodcock was a downright liar, which even today, decades after the loveable and respected horseman's death, would ostracise us with the Australian racing public, we must accept him on his word.

The ineluctable conclusion we are left with, whether we like it or not, is that Phar Lap's impeccable achievements here and overseas were utterly tonic, stimulant, and drug-free."

Contradicting this is the tonic book of Harry Telford, Phar Lap's owner and trainer, on display in Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

Following his death, Phar Lap's heart was donated to the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra and his skeleton to the New Zealand's National Museum in Wellington.

After preparations of the hide by New York City taxidermist Louis Paul Jonas,[33] Phar Lap's stuffed body was placed in the Australia Gallery at Melbourne Museum.

In 1931, Gilbert Percy Whitley, an ichthyologist at the Australian Museum, proposed a new genus of seahorse, Farlapiscis,[45] named after Phar Lap.