How do you.....
 

..... define greatness?

Just wondering. I was having (another) Silent Witness fig... ummm, debate, and I realized that i can go on and on about why a particular horse is great but defining it altogether? A little tough.

Two rules..... what i don't want is an ultra-long soliloquy and no cliches allowed.

You know, short and to the point.

(Hemingwayesque). :D

Who wants to go first?

High performance and longevity.

Sustained high performance and longevity.

Six Grade 1 wins plus two Eclipse Awards.

Me, when i am in a good mood

It also helps to overcome adversity at a very high level.....like Seattle Slew in the Jockey Club Gold Cup and Ghostzapper when he was carried out 15 paths by Saint Liam in the Woodward.

The ability to win at a very high level when things don't go your own way.

My sex life when I was about one half of my current age.

Afleet Alex as well??

like Invasor in the Whitney - way too close to a fast pace, crazy middle move and still wins.



edit: lets not forget his Donn race... where is Jara now??

He never ran a fast race.

He was a lot faster than Afleet Alex but not as fast as the real greats of the past. To me he was pretty much as good as Cigar...though Cigar was a little faster on his best days.

Here's the problem as I see it, to many people who haven't followed the game for that long, and don't know the history, these horses are special....because relative to what they've seen they are, in fact, special. Now, in the short term there's nothing specifically wrong with that, but in relation to the true greats these horses are also rans. That doesn't mean they aren't very good horses, but it also doesn't put them in the rarified air of the true greats, and if you are going to attach the word " great " to a horse it is competing with history....and not just the personal history of the judger.

How bout this MMSC???

in today's state of racing we will never have another " great " horse.

What about a horse like Left Bank. Multiple Graded wins and track records at 2 different distances?

Track records are highly overrated. They are too much a function of track condition and not enough of a function of the horse's brilliance.

Must win at least one superbowl

For me, it's the ability to not just compete but win the majority of times that a horse faces the highest levels of his/her competition while either running fast times or earning high figures or preferrably both and doing it under a variety of different circumstances. I look at horses that travel well and horses that run on different kinds of surfaces and give them extra credit.

I really got the feeling that Invasor was just getting real good and could've been great. He was also the type that only ran as fast as necessary to win.
However, we could speculate all night about horses that were injured before thier prime.


As for Jarhead Jara, he is plucking oranges somewhere near Gulfstream.:)

If Silent Witness wasn't great he was very, very good...

Left Bank had a very good couple of months and a very disappointing couple of years.