The 3-year-old male group was really close to impossible to do.

Anyone of seven or eight have great cases ... and that doesn't include Barbaro.

Curlin - a 2-time Horse of the Year - was a horse that I was surprised didn't make it. I had him 5th .. and if anyone put him 1st I wouldn't argue much.

I think everyone has a built in bias that favors the 2nd half of the year in each division ... and they rightly should. However, the 3yo male division is the one division where I think as much or more emphasis should be placed on the first half of the season as it is the second half.

No one was any more against Smarty Jones in the Triple Crown series than I was .. I badly underestimated his ability to get a distance! And few horses ever had fans as annoying as Smarty Jones fans.

Smarty Jones won a very rapid Rebel Stakes over Purge. Purge totally blew out fields in fast wins in the Peter Pan, Jim Dandy, and Cigar Mile.

Smarty Jones won a very fast Ark Derby over Borrego.

Smarty Jones toyed with a solid enough field in the Kentucky Derby. If you want to say the wet track helped speed ... in that case it helped a very solid horse in Lion Heart a lot more. How much did the wet track in this years Derby help speed?

Smarty Jones Preakness win was a mind boggling performance. 118 Beyer .. 11.5 length victory .. and left a trio of future Grade 1 winners murdered in his wake. It visually looked a little too much like Funny Cide's 9+ length romp over Midway Road and Scrimshaw to appreciate it.

All this from a horse who, as a 2yo, ran an insane figure despite breaking slow from the rail in his only stakes try sprinting.

I don't think anyone sane can possibly watch the Belmont and not conclude that SJ ran without a doubt a far superior race to everyone else.

He had to fight on the lead with Purge early - easily dispose of Purge after 6 furlongs - have a 7f Grade 1 Malibu winner in Rock Hard Ten make a big and insanely pre-mature move at him ... which he repelled shockingly effortless. He ran a spectacular race for 11 furlongs .. and a dream trip next out Travers winner was able to grind him down when he hit a wall and stopped in the last furlong.

After 10fs in the Belmont:

Smarty Jones 1st by 3.5 lengths
Birdstone 2nd by 3.5 lengths
Rock Hard Ten 3rd by 5 lengths
Eddington 4th by 7 lengths
Royal Assault 5th by 15 lengths

It wasn't totally lost on me either that Smarty Jones was trained by John Servis and ridden by Stewart Elliot. Not exactly a wizardly trainer and a competent jock. Still, if someone put Curlin 1st and Smarty Jones 5th .. I wouldn't argue that much.

I almost crapped my pants when I saw that race. I still can't find it on Youtube... paging Kiri's Clown!

I remember being at Colonial Downs Handicapping Contest with Randall and watching him (Bashford Manor Stakes maybe?) and we both thought there was no way in hell he was gonna get up to win. Rand turned to me afterwards and immediatly declared him the Hopeful winner.

Yeah his Basford Manor was incredible. I don't think it came back as a very fast figure, but he absolutely exploded in the final strides.
If I remember correctly he looked hopelessly out of it with about a furlong to go and then closed like an absolute beast.
The fact that he had already demonstrated that affinity for the CD track was just one of the many things that made me extremely confident going into the BCJ that year. Oops.

I agree, but I think I would give the edge to Point Given because he turned in excellent performances before the Triple Crown series, during the Triple Crown series, and after the Triple Crown series. Smarty obviously did the first two, but not the last. Coming back from his huge Belmont performance to win the Haskell and the Travers gives Point Given the edge in my book.
I do agree, however, that Smarty faced much tougher competition than did Point Given. Beating up on I Love Silver and Touch Tone is a little less impressive than defeating the quality 3yos Smarty faced.
It is a tough call.

Point Given gives nothing at all away to Smarty Jones on competition faced IMO.

He was an absolute ox ... and I'd surely give him an edge over SJ at 10fs and beyond.

PG wasn't as tactically gifted though ... you look at him running 5th by 11 lengths in the Derby ... and that race had a lot to do with him being taken out of his game and way closer to a very fast pace then he needs to be against that quality of speed horses that were in that years Derby.

I'm confident Point Given would have had a great deal of trouble beating SJ at 8.5 furlongs and probably even 9f in a fairly run race.

Tiznow finished his 3yo season with Beyers of 115-114-119-116 ... while traveling from Del Mar, La Downs, Santa Anita, Churchill.

He didn't break his maiden until after the Preakness in his 3rd try. I think he's a clear-cut #1 choice if you show that built in bias to the 2nd half of the season... but way too many 3yos are burned out from tough early campaigns.

LH was nothing special.

SJ was very good, but the never-faced-older thing hurts him a bit.

May not have even hit the board in that '04 BCC

DrugS, how soon can we expect to see a similar all-decade team from you for horsey-board posters?
Coming up with the various divisions like you did here might be tough, but we know you can do it.

now, that's funny Sh*t...

Not to go all James Taylor on everyone...but over the decade ....

I've seen tards and I've seen trolls,
I've seen crappy posts that I thought would never end

I've seen a lot.

Some of the best posters are no-brainers - a few of the others are kind of like Jim Thorpe types... a strong horsey board poster that the vast majority has never seen .. and probably will never see again.

I won't even attempt to make categories and rate such things - cause obviously you can't support those ratings with statistical facts...only amusing stories and personal opinion.

The real fun would be not rating the decade's best - but rather the decades worst and or most outrageous. The Horsey Board Hall of Shame.

Sports Illustrated's Top 20 of the Decade...

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200.../horse.racing/

Wow.

Oh. My. God.

This one is truly worthy of it's own thread.

Pepper's Pride rated above both Congaree and Medaglia D' Oro.

Tears Jerry. Tears!

one of the worst lists ever. i'd rate it close to the top in a top ten list of bad lists. any person who puts curlin ahead of the likes of tiznow and ghostzapper needs a new job.

I love it when mainstream sports guys try to write on Horse Racing.:wf

Renickulous couldn't have done any worse.

Crist's list:

http://www.drf.com/news/article/109814.html

But this was when Todd was at the top of his "game" wasn't it.....All of TP horses had that extra at the top of the stretch in those days....

I think he's made a huge error in letting European form influence his selections.

I ignored European form.

How can you possibly explain Johannesburgh being ranked #1 after he ran a final time of 1:42.27 with a perfect trip ... the same day and same distance - Tempura went 1:41.49 and beat a mind-bogglingly strong group of females.

Tempura isn't even ranked in his top 3 ... he has Indian Blessing - who went WAY slower than War Pass ahead of her.

Absolutely no one can make a rational case arguing the 3yo crop of males from 2007 was better than the 3-year-old crop of males from 2000. That was a laughable statement.

Obviously Curlin can be rated #1 on accomplishments because he won a triple crown race and the BC Cup Classic.

He was also beaten 8 lengths in the Derby, beaten by a stumbling filly in the Belmont, soundly defeated in the Haskell, and in his BC Classic win ... the only older male that showed up was Awesome Gem and Curlin's final time was only slightly faster than a 2yo in War Pass.

I know Crist choose to 100% ignore speed figures in doing his ... so you can't knock him for where he placed Invasor .. but look at the horses Invasor beat after he was obliterated in Dubai by third time starter Discreet Cat....they all sucked except for Bernardini... and Bernardini had one of the all-time worst rides in BC Classic history and was clearly better.

I think he must still be suffering from side-affects of the Smarty Party because personally I just don't think we saw a race from Curlin that was as brilliant as Smarty's Preakness and Belmont. Also, only using Champions ends up with horses like Invasor over M D'O.

Crist also posted his 7 best non-champions of the decade:

7. Fabulous Strike: He may have been the best pure six-furlong horse in the country the last three years, but a disdain for synthetic surfaces and a few narrow defeats have kept him short of a championship. He has won 12 sprint stakes and lost photos in three other Grade 1's.

6. Lava Man: Current comeback attempt aside, Lava Man was already one of the most durable and accomplished horses of the decade, winning 17 of 47 career starts over seven seasons. His seven Grade 1 wins include three Hollywood Gold Cups, 2005-07.

5. Ventura: In 13 American starts, Ventura had a 7-5-1 slate that included four Grade 1 victories and a four-length romp in the then-ungraded Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Sprint. A leading contender for both a female-sprinter and female-turf Eclipse last year and this year, she lost out to Indian Blessing and Forever Together in 2008 and is expected to come up short against Informed Decision and Goldikova this year.

4. Better Talk Now: The ageless gelding, a winner in 14 of 51 career starts, ran in five straight Breeders' Cup Turfs from 2004 through 2008, winning in his first try and missing by half a length to Red Rocks in his third. He won five other Grade 1 races and was near the top of the turf division almost every year.

3. Medaglia d'Oro: He earned $5.7 million with eight wins and seven seconds in 17 career starts - running worse than second only in the 2002 Derby and Preakness. He won a Travers, a Whitney, and a Donn and may have been second in more important races than any horse in recent history: two Breeders' Cup Classics, a Dubai World Cup, a Pacific Classic, Belmont Stakes, and Wood Memorial.

2. Commentator: He is the only horse of the 2000's besides Ghostzapper to have run three Beyer Speed Figures of 120 or more, two of them coming in his victories in the 2005 and 2008 Whitney. The fragile but brilliant front-runner won 14 of 24 starts over six seasons before being retired last August.

1. Pleasantly Perfect: The only other horses to win both the Breeders' Cup Classic and Dubai World Cup - Cigar, Invasor, and Curlin - were Horse of the Year. So were the only five horses to earn more than his $7.7 million - those three, Fantastic Light, and Skip Away. Yet Pleasantly Perfect never won an Eclipse Award, finishing second among the nation's older horses to Mineshaft in 2003 and to Ghostzapper in 2004.

http://www.drf.com/news/article/109816.html

I would have put Congaree in over Lava Man without a doubt. Lava Man never even faced a field that had the depth and quality of the one that Congaree destroyed in the 2002 Cigar Mile.

NT