Big Brown - Overrated?

[slotdirt]

I don't think Lost in the Fog was particularly overhyped. Bernardini was also clearly a superior animal, though with only seven career starts prior to retirement, it would be pretty hard to determine how good he really was. Not as good as Invasor at least, I suppose.

I was just perusing through the Bloodhorse list of top 100 throughbreds of the 20th century, and couldn't help but notice the huge discrepancy between the horses on that list who ran in the 90's (Silver Charm, Cigar, Skip Away, etc.) and the horses we see today. All of those horses ran at least 24 times in their careers. I would think if you put together a top 50 list of the best horses of this decade, most of the names on the list wouldn't have started many more than 10 times.

Anyway, bit of a thread hijack, I know, but it's just interesting to note that while the average number of starts for a horse probably isn't declining, I'd have to imaging the average career starts for stakes horses are declining significantly in the very recent past.