12/15-16 (LRC): Soviet Problem; King Glorious

[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by RolloTomasi

The best horse King Glorious ever beat was Hawkster, and he did that when he was a 2yo. Hawkster was about 10 lengths better on the grass than he was on the dirt, too, by the way.

At 3 King Glorious was the best of the second tier 3yos, pummeling sprinter Musci Merci, Finger Lakes terror Mercedes Won, turf marathoners Shy Tom and Charlie Barley, and Meadowlands loiterers Rampart Road and Roi Danzig in paceless 9 furlong races on speed-favoring surfaces.

If he had run in the Travers against Easy Goer, he probably would have kept Clever Trevor from finishing second by running himself and the great Oklahoma-bred into the ground.

If he had run in the Swaps against Sunday Silence, he probably would have enabled the black colt to win the race by giving him a distance-limited target to track rather than trying to make all only to get caught while dawdling in the stretch by the sharp Prized.

If King Glorious deserves a better race than a late season Cal-bred juvenile stakes race then Lost Code and Richman deserve to have the Arc de Triomphe and the Melbourne Cup re-named in their honor respectively...

Perhaps all of this is correct. Personally, I am not a believer that only horses who excel at distances past nine furlongs can be considered good. I appreciate a good sprinter too. I feel like it’s harder to separate yourself from the rest when the distances are shorter and the margin for error is smaller and more horses are bred to run at the shorter distances. Having said that, I do believe KG was one of the fastest 2yo horses I’ve seen. He set a track record in his first start, a stakes record in his second start, came to the big leagues and ran a 1:08 4/5 in his third, sat out for over three months and then ran a 1:21 2/5, which at the tome equaled the second fastest time ever for a 2yo.

How would he have fared at the longer distances against the likes of Sunday Silence and Easy Goer? It’s highly probable that they would have handled him. They are all-time greats. But if you lined them up in a race like the Met Mile or the Vosburgh or BC Sprint, I’d feel very good about my chances with him. For whatever it’s worth, Gary Stevens once told me that at 9f, they could beat him but that up to a mile, they’d wonder what hit them.