Note that I haven't really offered my own opinions on this subject. There's more than one question at hand, really.
"Best (whatever)" is translated by different people as "Most talented" or "Most dominant" but the truth is, that's not always the same thing. A truly talented horse will dominate the opposition, but dominating opposition does not necessarily equate to extremely high talent. In fact, the less talented the opposition, the less talented you need to be to dominate it.
Therefore, looking at traditional measures of dominance (win record, winning margins, etc) is a start, not the end, of answering the question. If that's all it were, one could say, for example, that since Hindoo won 19 straight races at 3 in 1881 (counting a walkover), he must be the best US 3YO ever. Or that by beating one rival by whatever extreme margin that it really was, Man o' War proved in the Lawrence Realization that he was the best US 3YO ever. Of course these were both pretty good 3YOs, but IMHO as a racing observer and historian, that's barely the beginning of answering the question of "who was the best US 3YO?"
A lot of people seem to have real trouble dealing with the truth that winning many races or winning races by large margins is, in itself, not proof of greatness. All it is is proof that said horse is better than what walked into the gate next to him. Beating them a lot means that he's consistently better than these; winning by a lot means that he's much better than these. But there's a huge question being begged that as far as I'm concerned means as much as, if not more, than merely noting that this horse is better than the opposition and that is, how good IS the opposition?
Horse racing is inherently subjective, every race affected by countless variables, so there's never going to be answers that are 100 percent definitive, 100 percent provable, 100 percent reproducible - that is, answers that will satisfy the scientist in me. And that's why I shy away from declaring "best evers" and creating "top x" lists, because - honestly - the moment you rank two horses that didn't run against each other a number of times, what you're ranking is your opinion, not the relative talent of the horses.
That's not to say that it's not worth wondering and debating "best evers." Beyond the gambling aspect, that's one of the great purposes of horse racing - to experience horses so good that they must find their comparison in history, not in flesh-and-blood rivals. But I have to point out that if you're going to do that with any sort of validity, as soon as you think about what a horse accomplished, you have to do what you can to put it in perspective by asking yourself what it was accomplished against. How good was the opposition? What did they win, and against whom? When did they do it? Did a given rival horse put forth a credible effort on the meeting in question? When you find a horse competing against rivals who themselves won many comparable races over similar conditions in a reasonably close time frame and which offered a representative effort on the day they met, it changes everything. A narrow margin against high-class, in-form opposition means a lot more, IMHO, than a large winning margin against vastly inferior rivals. A few decent losses against really good rivals makes for a better race record than one with virtually no defeats compiled against utter nonentities.
That's the view I choose to take. I admit that I have exacting standards, and my standards, based upon horses doing enough to actually have worthwhile established form, are increasingly archaic, but this is where I stand.
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