Quote:
Originally Posted by Danzig
then you're another who sounds clueless when discussing rachel and her campaign last year. it was a true rarity. i get you prefer zenyatta, but rachel had a fabulous year last year. sorry. you're letting personal preference and bias cloud your judgement. any other year, zenyatta wins hoy. but last year wasn't any other year.
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It was a rarity and it was historic and it was fabulous. But how good was it? I feel like too much is made of the names on the races and the sexes of the horses she beat (in the case of the Woodward, the sexes and ages). She held off Mine that Bird and he's not won a race since and has one win in nearly two years. She beat Macho Again and Bullsbay but then every 3yo with a pulse beat them last year and beat them worse than she did. She was absolutely dominant against Summer Bird and that, for my money, was her top performance and the race that told me she was a really good one. I say we make too much out of the ages and sexes thing because we should be judging them by the quality of the horses beaten, not the age or sex. Take Serena's Song. She rarely gets mentioned but she beat 3yo males twice and even though she didn't beat older males, she did beat older Heavenly Prize and Lakeway in the Beldame. They were females but I'd take them over Macho Again and Bullsbay as tougher competition. Winning Colors beat a field of males that was probably 20x tougher in the Derby than Rachel did in the Preakness. One of them won the Cigar against older and another ran second in the BC Classic. She also beat them in the SA Derby. Instead of facing older males later, she was losing twice (by 3/4 length and then by a nose) to Personal Ensign. So Rachel was historic for beating Macho Again by a nose and Winning Colors is an afterthought for losing to Personal Ensign by one. Lost among all of the talk is how close we came to never seeing Rachel do any of this stuff. If she isn't sold to Jackson before the Preakness, her previous owner didn't want to run her against males. Would that mean that she would have somehow been less talented? Of course not. We were just lucky that she was put into the hands of someone that wanted to test her. If Winning Colors or Serena's Song weren't trained by Lukas, we may not have ever gotten a chance to see how they fared against the boys but it wouldn't mean they were any less talented than they were. A lot of what horses accomplish is not always solely based on how good they are but also on opportunity and timing. Rachel got lucky in that of the horses generally considered the top 5-6 3yos last year (Quality Road, Blame, Old Fashioned, The Pamplemousse, I Want Revenge, and Summer Bird), she only had to face one of them. None of that's her fault and of course she still had to go out and win the races and she proved herself as a top class horse by doing so and she earned HOY. But please, consider the quality of the competition faced more than the age and sex when talking about her season as one of the all-time greatest.
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The real horses of the year (1986-2020)
Manila, Java Gold, Alysheba, Sunday Silence, Go for Wand, In Excess, Paseana, Kotashaan, Holy Bull, Cigar, Alphabet Soup, Formal Gold, Skip Away, Artax, Tiznow, Point Given, Azeri, Candy Ride, Smarty Jones, Ghostzapper, Invasor, Curlin, Zenyatta, Zenyatta, Goldikova, Havre de Grace, Wise Dan, Wise Dan, California Chrome, American Pharoah, Arrogate, Gun Runner, Accelerate, Maximum Security, Gamine
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08-29-2010, 05:57 PM
Hybrid Mode
