If Zenyatta wins the Classic

[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by Slewbopper

I see no problem giving a divisional award to a horse that has run only once in NA....i.e. Arazi. The big prize, Horse of the Year, is a different tune though. It should be based on a body of work for the year, not one race

At this point, my ratings would be...

1....Rachel
2....Gio Ponti
3....Summer Bird

You do know that the year Arazi won he divisional championship, he was also one of the three finalist for HOY too right? That means that he was considered over many horses that had a body of work for the year. You say the big prize IS a different tune but how can you logically say that when Arazi was a finalist off of one race? As I've said so many times, I'd have no problem with changing the qualifying criteria to saying that a horse has to be based in this country and run the majority of their races here or maybe a four race minimum here. But as long as it only says that a horse needs to have raced once, I don't see how everyone can say that it's based on the whole year when that's contrary to what it says. If an individual voter wants to only consider American based horses, that's fine. But the person that considers the best horse among all qualified horses is equally right.

I'm not old enough to know what happened in 1954.