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Originally Posted by miraja2
Everybody has different definitions.
The things you pointed out obviously indicate that Ginger Punch is a very good, and fairly versatile horse. She has won graded stakes races in the slop and on fast surfaces, and around both one turn and two turns. There are definitely a lot of good horses out there that can't do that.
I think the reason that many people wouldn't call her great is that she has never really run a "great" individual race (her top lifetime BSF is only a 104), and several of her big wins (last year's Ruffian, this year's Louisville BC, and yesterday's race) have been run in very slow times.
I don't think anybody would dispute that she is a very accomplished mare who deserves high marks for consistency, but the mythical title of "great" is extremely subjective.
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Jack Van Berg used to say that "the only place time matter is in prison." I simply can't fault a horse for running "very slow" time yet managing to win and hit the board in Graded stakes races. I know at least yesterday the fact that she only galloped along for 7 1/2 furlongs before squeezing between two horses in upper strecth to pull away to a somewhat easy victory is an indication of a very speacial if not great horse.
I do agree that everybody has different scales of greatness and it is a difficult thing to define especially now that we rarely get to see the best horses of any given generation race into their four year old campaign, except of course this year with Curlin.