It is pretty sad that Man O' War had to duck a horse---when he was running in a day when less than 2K foals were born each year.
His big victory was earned in a match race, run in Canada, against a horse that entered the Kentucky Derby as a hapless maiden, and was only running for the purpose of setting a fast pace for his stablemate.
You could probably find better horses currently stabled on the grounds of Bay Meadows, than those that Man O' War was beating up on.
While he was no doubt the king of his crop, and ran fast times for his day, he never faced anything close to the kind of horse that he would have needed to beat convincingly, in order to make a justified claim to the title 'Greatest horse of the 1900's.'
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