Quote:
Originally Posted by moodwalker
Then let's retitle the thread "Defining a GREAT American horse"
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Fair enough, though I would have to suggest that, given the context, it's understood.
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On a different tangent ...
I have never been a big fan of efforts to rank international/all-time competitors in all-inclusive best-ever/great lists.
We ("we" defined as "posters on this board") could easily sit at our computers all day and argue relative merits of two US-based horses that were running in the last year or so, maybe even against each other, in races that we saw (on TV or otherwise) against competitors that we know well. And given that that's true, the idea of reliably producing lists of "greats" or "best-evers" from vastly different places and times with which we have little to no familiarity is difficult.
First, there's the inevitable effect of the dulling edge of time and space. There could be a really great horse running right now in South Africa, but chances are, no one on this board voraciously follows the everyday minutiae of racing in South Africa sufficiently to properly appraise said horse's efforts. Likewise, there were great horses running 75, 100 years ago that many people on this board (including me) have never even heard of. This is simply a truth, not an indictment. After all, many of us learned - and continue to learn - about racing from the media, and the basic elements of news dictate that news media concentrates on the here and now. That's great when you're reading today's news, but that's not so great when you're undertaking an effort to identify greatness in all places and times. Unless your knowledge of racing is entirely founded in old books, ancient yellow newspapers, or material imported from other countries, it is almost impossible to avoid the effect of having lesser knowledge of places and times other than your own.
But really, this problem is surmountable. Information exists if you care enough to go looking for it. The problem is, when you find it, you will judge it by your standards of greatness. Therein lies the biggest issue in trying to judge horses from different eras and places.
What ultimately ends up being debated is less the greatness of the horses involved but of the various ways in which racing observers from different places and times defined greatness. Some contemporary horses that are considered "great" would not be considered thus by observers who had different expectations of greatness, whether that expectation was based upon lengthy careers, weight-carrying, running against open company, racing over a distance of ground, etc. Likewise, we may not consider some great of the past to be as great as his or her contemporaries did simply because our measures of greatness have changed. How great does the general modern population of racing fans think Gallorette - who lost more than two-thirds of her races - is now? Fifty years ago, many reasonable observers thought she was the best female in US racing history.
High-class horses are generally campaigned in a manner to demonstrate greatness by their contemporary standards. Gallorette did not have a 10- or 15-race career, limited to filly/mare opposition, as would a good filly today; if she had, her race record would be more impressive to modern viewers but of course she would not have impressed observers of the 1940s. Likewise, Ghostzapper did not have to run more than four times a year in order to impress his contemporary observers. Perhaps he might have been great by standards of some other day, but he never had to prove it. Ghostzapper would've looked much less great to the modern eye if he'd lost some races because he raced a lot and gave gobs of weight to stakes-class horses, just as Gallorette would've looked much less great to eyes of her time if she'd been raced infrequently against inferior competition but had retired with a higher win percentage. (I'm not, BTW, picking on either of these horses here, merely using them as examples of products of very different standards of greatness.)
The seeming answer would be to assign greatness, or rank horses, by the standards of their day rather than one's own, but this is a tricky exercise since a human being, with preferred standards of greatness, has to make command decisions. I, for example, realize intellectually that a Ghostzapper should be measured by standards of greatness of the early 21st century, but my standards are based on a different paradigm and I find greatness, by early 21st century standards, to be unpalatable and inferior. If I were to make a "great" list, it's very unlikely that a Ghostzapper would be on it. But truthfully, what's being judged is not the horse but the standard that made a career like his not just acceptable, but desirable.
The problem is, greatness is pretty much impossible to quantify objectively or judge fairly.
