To me true greatness is best defined as the intersection of talent and accomplishment. Many horses have great talent without enough of a resume to qualify for greatness (Ghostzapper), while many others have special accomplishments but not necessary historical talent (Lava Man)...but few have both when measured against history.

As pointed out above, the nature of racing today essentially prevents any horse from reaching greatness - at least in a historical sense. The DRF Champions book makes for great reading in seeing what the careers of some of the older superstars looked like. Horses today just don't do what those horses did. Most of them don't have the ability to (which is why greatness is an exclusive club), but the remainder never get the chance to (due to limited racing schedules or injuries). It's pretty sobering looking at the records of some of today's stars to remind yourself that a horse like Spectacular Bid was 24 for 24 at distances between 7f and 1 1/4 (14 Grade 1's) or that Buckpasser managed to put together a run of 24 wins and 2 seconds in 26 starts after his debut, or that Bold 'n Determined (hardly a household name) managed to win 7 Grade 1's in 1981 without even winning the 3 yo filly title. The examples are countless.

She was a 3YO in 1980.....when Genuine Risk won the Derby.

I think Asiatic Boy was that good that day, he was just very poorly handled afterwards as you mentioned.

Then Bernardini should have been able to win despite the premature move if he was so good. I've watched the race plenty of times. Castellano made an early move out of a foolish fear that Lava Man would make his typical mid-turn move before him and get the jump. If Bernardini was good enough he would have won despite the premature move like Invasor did in the Whitney or at the very least put up a fight. Instead he let Invasor blow by him like he was standing still. Bernardini was no faster than Invasor coming into the Classic and lost to him head to head.

I was going to point out the same thing. You look at the horses of the past and are amazed and them winning grade ones year after year after year. The string of races that makes their career is far and away better than any horse you see today. Eeven if the breeding shed doesn't take them, it seems horses today would just not hold up.

Spyder

"Most people have difficulty in defining what was truly great, and what they simply have heard of." - Memoirs of a Geisha

This is a really good point but I want to ask something and I'll use king's Silent Witness thought as an example....

He and I have had that discussion quite a few times... horses like Silent Witness and Makybe Diva and whether or not they were greats.

I realize I'm a newer fan and so my frame of reference is a lot different, but don't the older fans also do this... consider the horses who first excited them as great?

I mean on King's tagline for example.....I'm assuming he's saying King Glorious and Java Gold were great (?). I'm not saying they were or weren't... I have no idea.

Silent Witness won 18 races... 18 - 3 - 2 out of 29. Went to Japan a couple of times, won the Sprinters Stakes over there, in his career repeatedly beat G1 winners.

So for someone who came into the game when he was undefeated and just phenomenal, for someone who didn't know any of the history of the sport, he defined greatness and that's why.

I can understand the other side though, the people who say he beat the same horses over and over.

My problem with that is that not everyone realizes just how good these other horses were. Cape of Good Hope for example.

Do the older fans do this? I'm not trying to be cute, I really want to know.

Does history make a great horse greater?

The great horses of the past..... if one were to look at who they beat, whether or not they remained in one area, etc. would they still measure up in general or have they become part of folklore?

It seems like no present day horse ever measures up to the past and I'm trying to figure out if this is valid or not.

I realize it probably is, but.....

Of course people are influenced by personal favorites of their's but hopefully that doesn't cloud their judgement. If you're a serious horseplayer it certainly better not and most likely doesn't. You shouldn't bet horses just because you have some sort of affinity for them and you shouldn't overrate them for the same reason. Hopefully KG realizes that King Glorious and Java Gold weren't great horses.....because they weren't ( and I loved Java Gold as much as any horse I ever saw race ).

I think in the past people had a much better field of comparison than they do these days as horses raced more often and for longer and thus their warts got exposed more readily. For that reason, the few that showed exceptional talent proved it on the racetrack. Horses like Buckpasser ( who was mentioned earlier ) and Dr. Fager left indisputable proof on the racetrack of their massive talents. I think the proponents of some of the paper tigers of recent years should take a good look at the lifetime pps of Foolish Pleasure, a horse hardly considered great, and thus get a good dose of what it must have taken to be placed on that pedestal even 30 short years ago.

Silent Witness was probably at least a very substantial racehorse to have accomplished what he did but I just don't know nearly enough about him to measure his real talent.

Again, that's a good point.

I don't know anything about Silent Witness, other than very casually. But I do think that who a horse beat during his races is very important as well as overall record, track records, overcoming adversity and Eclipse Awards.

I just recently had a conversation about a horse with a good friend. It was about Cigar. Despite winning four Elcipse Awards, my friend argued that Cigar was just a "marginally great" horse. He rattled off name of several horses that finished 2nd to Cigar during the streak; Dramatic Gold, Personal Merit, Wekeva Springs, Soul of the Matter, Devil His Due and Silver Goblin, among others.

I said these were all nice horses and he said yes, they were nice but they were not champions (I could be wrong but I beieve the only Eclipse winners Cigar beat were Holy Bull and Heavenly Prize).

Finally he asked me who was the best horse Cigar ran against. It was Skip Away who Cigar lost narrowly to in the JCGC (great race). So, his argument was that Cigar was just marginally great since he didn't beat champons and lost at weight-for-age vs the best horse he competed against.

Finally what seems to subordinate the best contemporary horses compared to the past is weight. Horses just don't carry and give major weight any more. It used to be the summer races for 4 yo's+ were meaningful handicaps and the fall series brought 3 yo's and older together to see who was the best of the season. It just does not happen any longer.

Cigar is ranked 18th on that Bloodhorse top 100 list that came out in 1999. Cigar, John Henry(23rd) and Spectacular Bid(10th) are the only horses in the top 25 of that list to have raced since 1980.

If you talk to people who have been around the racetrack a very long time the one horse who's name gets mentioned with reverance more than any other is Dr. Fager.

You're kidding right? I had my fill of this discussion last year on the other forum.
It's a pleasure knowing that astute race watchers like yourself are the competition.

Dr. Fager was way better than any of those mentioned in this thread. Way better. He finished first in every race except the two when Hedevar rabbited for Damascus. He also got DQ'd in a race when he took a bite out of In Reality as he was passing him by.

Champion sprinter and co-champ turf horse in the same year.

It's a hell of a lot easier to rate great individual performances than it is to rate great horses.

Circumstances dictates outcomes in horse racing - inferior horses favored by the wide variety of circumstances beat superior horses every day - and it happens at every level.

Also - horses develop and go in and out of form at different times - they obviously have preferences to a wide variety of things starting with surface and distance.

Rating a performance is much easier and can be done with a much higher degree of accuracy than it is to rate how good a horse is overall.

Damascus looked like an invincible horse when he had the aid of a rabbit to kill off all the speed horses and set his run up.

I think he jogged in the Travers by about 15 in track record time with an insane duel well infront of him.

dr fager was an amazing, supremely talented horse. he ran his guts out every time, and no horse that tried to go with him early was still gutting it out with him in the end.
his one race on turf was enough to get him top honors in that group, and he hated the surface--but hated getting headed even worse.

altho others have been listed as better than him, it's hard to say really that he was worse than any one.

as to the true test of greatness....

man o war still gets props. as does citation, secretariat, etc. i'd imagine they still will years from now--matter of fact, there aren't many left, if any, who saw the original big red race-but he's still one that is mentioned to this day as defining greatness.

if you see a horse now and think he's great, ask yourself if his name will still even be known 20 years from now, let alone 80? if not, then he isn't great.

not for nothing that race is called the race of the century.

Huh?

Dr. Fager never went out of form. Cigar, once he got good, never went out of form.

The pretenders of today can't overcome any kind of a bad trip or carry weight, at least compared to horses of 25+ years ago.

Any race that featured a rabbit impacting the result doesn't deserve to be called the race of the century.

It ought to be a fairly run race - regardless of who is in it - to earn that title I would think.

i think it's called that due to who ran, not how it was run.

This is very good.

If we are going to use the good doctor as a measure of greatness then there are maybe 3 or 4 horses in history that can be considered in that class. What an absolute monster.

Was Affectionately great?

Is it just like everything else where there are layers and overlaps of this thing called greatness?

I was impressed reading over the Top 100 book.... I don't know much off the top of my head, not the type who can remember figures, but i do remember reading that she carried 137 in the Vagrancy.

I'm not trying to qualify her as being great because of this alone, but combined with her record of wins and beating the boys (which seems to matter to some, I think...) was she or wasn't she?

Thunder Gulch as well... although im not a big fan of giving a horse too much credit for beating breakdowns..

Heavenly Prize at least finished the race. I guess the mighty Cigar didn't break her down like so many others.

I absolutely do think KG and Java Gold were great horses. I think Ghostzapper and Smarty Jones were great horses. I think Lammatarra and Arazi were great horses as well. I didn't watch horses race before 1986 though so I don't think it's fair for me to accurately try to judge horses that ran before then. Sure, I can look over the history books and look at who they faced and beat, how fast they ran and how much weight they carried, how many championships they won, etc and form a pretty educated opinion on them but without having been there when it was happening, I wouldn't try to make the judgement. While I do think the horses that I listed were great horses, I wouldn't ever try to make the argument that they were better than the horses generally regarded as the best ever, horses like Bid or Secretariat or Dr. Fager. My opinion is not based on proven and tested facts as much as it is on limited evidence and belief. What I don't like, however, is the belief that some of the horses we've seen over the past 20 years COULDN'T have done what some of the greats of the past did. It's not fair to the horses to downgrade them because of what the humans have done to the game. Maybe King Glorious couldn't have carried 130+ and set a world record at a mile. But if Dr. Fager had been running today instead of when he was running, he wouldn't ever have gotten the chance to do some of the things he did. If Spectacular Bid was running today, chances are he'd not get a chance to run a 4yo campaign, which is where he showed his complete greatness. So it's about opportunity as well as ability. Today's horses may or may not have some of the ability of the past horses. We'll never know. Take a horse like Bernardini. He was dominant over his peers as a 3yo. He lost to a champion older horse by a length at the end of his 3yo season and every cynic pointed to that as proof that he was overrated. Didn't the great Spectacular Bid as a 3yo lose to the 4yo Affirmed in the 1979 JCGC? Didn't the great Affirmed as a 3yo lose to the 4yo Seattle Slew in the 1978 JCGC (both beaten by Exceller)? The difference was that each of those 3yo's got the chance to continue on as 4yo's an prove their greatness. Sometimes, opportunity and timing can be just as, if not more important than ability. I mention timing because I think that often, perception is important in how a horse is judged. Going back to Affirmed, think about his TC win. Without Alydar around, Affirmed would have streaked to wins of about three, eight, and 13 lengths and not only been a TC winner but a DOMINATING winner. I believe that the perception of just how good he was would be higher under that scenario. Same thing with Easy Goer/Sunday Silence. Without the other around, either of them would have been a runaway TC winner. I believe that had there been no Sunday Silence, people today would be talking about Easy Goer as one of the five best horses of all-time. An undeated 3yo season that included not only a TC sweep but wins in the Gotham, Wood, Travers and four grade one wins against older horses in the Suburban, Whitney, Woodward, and JCGC. I'm sure he'd be mentioned as top five ever. But....there was a Sunday Silence around. Does that mean that Easy Goer's actual talent level wasn't as high as it was? No. He was as good as we thought he was. He just wasn't as good as Sunday Silence. Ability+opportunity+timing.

You can believe all you want but they weren't great horses.

You make an interesting point about Affirmed, but I think his stock was actually elevated because Alydar was around, and his incredible ability to finish ahead of a horse as immensely talented as the mighty Alydar was the true measure of Affirmed. If you are at all confused about this find a film of Alydar's win in the Whitney as he prepped for the Travers ( and then find one of Affirmed making up five lengths on a loose on the lead Sensitive Prince in the final eighth of a mile in the Jim Dandy just a few days later ).

As for Easy Goer and Sunday Silence....you make another interesting point. However, I'm not sure that both horses shouldn't be considered great and they would surely have routinely drowned the likes of Java Gold, Smarmy Jones....and of course King Glorious. Azari was possibly a great 2YO...but so was Devil's Bag. Do you consider him great as well?

By the way, I think Java Gold did have the potential to be a very special horse but unfortunately both Pat Day and injuries kept us from seeing that. He was a wonderful horse. I have a great picture of him winning the Whitney somewhere. I should mail it to you.

As you know, over time, legends grow. To those that were around and know how good Alydar was, they hold Affirmed in much higher regard. But as time goes by, there are fewer and fewer around that know the complete situation and all they rely on are records and videos. If you didn't know anything about the other horses of his day and just watched videos of Affirmed running off with easy victories in the TC, your belief of how good he was would probably be higher than if you watched him eek out narrow victories over Alydar.

As for Easy Goer and Sunday Silence, how great either of them were is up for debate. But I'd bet 4/5 that Easy Goer would be in that top five conversation if there would have been no Sunday Silence because of his record. And I don't think either of them was as good as Java Gold or Smarty Jones. At 10f, I'd grudgingly have to give them the edge over KG but at 7f or 8f, I'll agree with what McCarron said; that they wouldn't catch him. Even at 9f, it might be tough if there wasn't anything up there to keep him company.

With Arazi, I'm not sure how good he was. I don't know if he was a great horse or not. What I do know is that I saw him make the same move in the Derby as he made in the BC and it wasn't a lack of ability that got him beat that day. He was done in by a lack of preparation and by the way his human connections handled him. With him, I thought he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that he could have, under the right circumstances, put some major wins on his record.

Right, but what you are really doing is bolstering my entire argument that because people don't know history they misevaluate horses. If you know history, you understand the true greatness of the likes of Affirmed and Alydar.....if you don't you lack the depth to either truly understand their talents and, more importantly, the real talents of those masquerading as their supposed heir apparents.

By the way, Smarty Jones ran one great race in his entire career, the Preakness, and failed the one time everything didn't go his way, the Belmont. Calling him great is like declaring a bartender great because the one time you bought a drink from her she somehow managed to pick out the only cold beer in cooler. Let her do it a few more times before acknowledging her exceptional talents.

That's not a fair comparison. There are lots more beers in the cooler.

I do agree with you 100% that knowing history is the best way to evaluate them as far as historical purposes. That's why I stick to evaluating only those that have run during my time.

I don't think he was ever the same after the surgery and the stupid Derby attempt. But I thought his Derby run was as good as his BC run was. He just didn't have the foundation under him to finish it off. It proved to me though that the BC was not a fluke.