[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by RolloTomasi

This is preposterous.

Mineshaft- 9 starts.
Congaree- 9 starts.
Medaglia D'Oro- 5 starts.
Pleasantly Perfect- 4 starts.
Milwaukee Brew- 4 starts.
Candy Ride- 3 starts.

Congaree was dusted in the Met Mile and beaten on the square in both the Kentucky Cup and the Breeder's Cup.

Pleasantly Perfect and Milwaukee Brew were opportunists at best.

Perfect Drift wasted starts on turf and was no factor in the BC.

Medaglia D'Oro beat the exact same horses Mineshaft did (ie Olmodovar, Evening Attire, Volponi, etc.), but lost both his starts at 10f including the BC Classic.

Candy Ride won a single main track race in a 3-horse field which included a horse that was retired 24 hours later with an injury, and he himself was never heard from again.

By less, I wasn't referring at all to number of starts. I was talking about taking the paths of least resistence. I wouldn't care if a horse ran twice. If they took on the toughest competition out there, I'd value that more than one that starts 10 times and doesn't face anything other than allowance competition. You mention that Medaglia lost both of his starts at 10f. While that's true, just saying that doesn't even begin to tell the story. In the Pacific Classic, if I'm not mistaken, he also broke the track record while losing. In the BC, he ran his eyeballs out while losing to a pretty good 10f horse while dueling throughout the race with another one in Congaree. This whole thing about him and 10f is pretty stupid. It wasn't the distance that found him out in either of those races. If that were the case, he wouldn't have won the Travers and lost the Belmont by just a 1/2 length, I don't care who he was facing in those races. Personally, I think too much is made of wins and losses and the actual performance is lost. A horse like Rachel Alexandra is made into some kind of superhero for dueling with Big Drama and holding off Mine that Bird or for dueling in the Woodward and holding off Macho Again yet MDO is downgraded because he couldn't hold off Pleasantly Perfect after dueling with Congaree and Winning Colors is downgraded because she couldn't hold off Risen Star after dueling with Forty Niner (and running him into submission) in the Preakness.

You talk about how Congaree and MDO and Perfect Drift were beaten in the Classic but you miss the point I was making in the first place. That they were all there to face each other meant that all of them except for one would have to lose. Congaree faced Perfect Drift in Kentucky. They both couldn't win. MDO and Candy Ride both couldn't win the Pacific Classic. Congaree, Milwaukee Brew, and Pleasantly Perfect were all in the San Antonio. This is what I'm talking about. Their records were all going to suffer because they were consistently facing each other while Mineshaft was getting a steady diet of lower level horses.