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Originally Posted by The Indomitable DrugS
It is pretty sad that Man O' War had to duck a horse---when he was running in a day when less than 2K foals were born each year.
His big victory was earned in a match race, run in Canada, against a horse that entered the Kentucky Derby as a hapless maiden, and was only running for the purpose of setting a fast pace for his stablemate.
You could probably find better horses currently stabled on the grounds of Bay Meadows, than those that Man O' War was beating up on.
While he was no doubt the king of his crop, and ran fast times for his day, he never faced anything close to the kind of horse that he would have needed to beat convincingly, in order to make a justified claim to the title 'Greatest horse of the 1900's.'
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You really seem to be in love with your stat on number of foals in a crop...I think your thinking is a bit simplistic...and wrong! True there were fewer foals per year but there were also fewer races, fewer tracks...the "hotbed" of racing was the east coast especially NY and MD, and there was sanity in the breeding shed. Today, breeding is about speed and producing precocious horses that often are retired before their 4th birthday. I submit that 100 well bred horses will be more competitive, particularly when forced to face each other than 1000 horses bred from unsound lines in a time when candidates for HOY can race constantly in grade one races and never face each other!