I love these figs that Bravado is posting. It is a great reminder of what a good horse genuinely looked like. Seeing Cigar's numbers is very interesting, as at the time everyone that used numbers recognized him as a good horse, and very consistent, but over all not supremely fast. When you compare him to some of the other horses Bravado has posted that is obvious. The problem is that these days very mediocre good horses get annointed as superstars. There was Smarty Jones, a relatively slow good horses ( save his LAST win...the Preakness ), and then there may be the worst offender of all time...Afleet Alex. People talk about him with hushed tones, and he was a nice horse, just slow. Would either of those two horses have run some really " fast " races had they stuck around, possibly, but also quite possibly they would have been swallowed up as perhaps some others improved. I highly doubt Afleet Alex would have had an easy time with the Flower Alley of the summer of 2005. On the other hand, Seattle Slew was " slow " as a 3YO and it wasn't until he was really tested, in the Fall of his 4YO season, that we found out how good he really was.
The point....stop annointing superstars based on a few races and keep some perspective on what we are seeing. These numbers of horses from the last 20 years offer some great perspective. I would like to see Precisionist's numbers, and the distances he was running, at his peak ( and before his awful unretirement ). Then there was Turkoman. Man, these were GOOD horses, and they raced.
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