[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by blackthroatedwind

I'm not sure not being " much " better than Bet Twice was not VERY good. Bet Twice was a mighty good 3YO and would have drowned some of the recent 3YOs that have been unreasonably lauded as " great ". The simple truth was that 1987 was a tremendous year for 3YOs and perhaps as deep a group as we have seen in the last 30 or more years.

Personally I favored Java Gold but unfortunately his only race against Alysheba, and the others, was in the slop in that great Travers. Yeah, I think he would have won on a dry track, but unfortunately that's only conjecture. And, what Alysheba did as a 4YO, without Lasix, will stamp him as one of the greats of my lifetime.

Talking and thinking about these horses only makes the paper tigers we see nowadays seem all the more mediocre. The older a racefan you are the harder it is to appreciate the lightly raced would-be champions of today.

In a way, u are right. The real truth is that all of those 3yo's (Java Gold, Alysheba, Bet Twice, Polish Navy, Gulch, Cryptoclearance, the forgotten Lost Code) were really good that year. I think it's far and away the best class in terms of talent AND depth that I've ever seen. I haven't even included the Derby favorite Demons Begone or a turf star like Trempolino or the fillies like Very Subtle, Miesque and Sacahuista. There was another highly regarded but not nationally known filly named Personal Ensign that year. Miesque too.

I absolutely agree with u that Alysheba's 4yo season was one for the ages and that seasons and horses like these we are speaking of make these horses of today look really bad. But I blame the humans more than the horses. I don't think horses like Bernardini, GZ, and Discreet Cat are any less talented than those horses from the past. They just don't get the opportunities to show it the same way. If those horses from the past were running today, they wouldn't be any less talented than they were but we wouldn't get the chance to see it on display and proven the way we did then.

Oh yeah, my original point wasn't to say that Alysheba and Bet Twice weren't that good. They were. It was to say that as good as Alysheba was, I didn't end that year with the clear feeling that he was better than Bet Twice was and after watching Bet Twice get handled in the Woodward by Polish Navy, who couldn't come close to beating JG, I felt the clear best horse was obvious. It will always kill me that he was 1-9 to be HOY and then ended up getting nothing.