Best 2 year old ever POLL!!!

[Phalaris1913]

Originally Posted by The Indomitable DrugS

I think the horses who ran pre-1930 get massively overrated in these discussions.....

Colin, Man O' War, and horses back than were certainly great for their time, however, they can't be fairly compared with later 2-year-old's, and in my opinion, just don't belong.

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I personally believe that the great horses from the 1800's would get drowned against the better horses of more recent decades.

What people don't realize, is how microscopic foal crops were back at that time. For example, the largest foal crop ever (1986) was 35 times larger than the foal crop Man O' War came from.

In my opinion, the members of that esteemed group who voted Man O' War the #1 horse of the 1900's, ought to be mocked for it.

I do happen to believe that horses can be considered on their merit much further back than some think. I tend to believe that there hasn't been significant improvement in the breed probably since a few generations this side of the downfall of heat racing (and only then because of the different traits one selects when breeding for what used to be referred to as "dashes" vs. heat racing), which was occurring by the mid 1800s in the US. While there are a few isolated exceptions, effectively, the stud books in major racing nations have been closed since long before the 1930s and I just wouldn't expect major changes in a closed gene pool from which breeders have been selecting for similar traits for well over 100 years.

A myth has been perpetrated on every generation for at least the last 150 years decrying the breeding for speed over stamina, for racing of 2YOs, etc, and every generation seems to believe it. It hasn't really been true since about the days when Lexington was a leading sire. In fact, if you take a look at the races they were running a hundred years ago, you'd be surprised how little has changed.

A lot of people have locked onto the fact that crops are larger today with total disregard for why they are larger. The thoroughbred population in the US initially exploded as a result of the need for mediocre horses to fill cards in a rapidly expanding racing industry - for new tracks, for more races per card and for longer seasons. While this did generate more stakes events, this was basically an expansion at the bottom: providing more races, quality no object, for then-eager, burgeoning crowds to bet on. Since people were already breeding all the available high-quality bloodstock, the only way this occurred in large scale, at the speed with which it did, was by breeding bad mares that due to infirmity, total lack of ability or production record of offspring who couldn't outrun goats - mares which previously would have been culled or never used for breeding to begin with - being bred to whatever stallions they could be sent to. Back in the days of small books, I promise you that these were not good stallions. Occasionally you get something decent, but breeding bad to worse generally gets you marginal stock. Another major round of population explosion occurred during the last market boom when the excesses of the bloodstock market encouraged indiscriminate breeding in hopes of striking it rich, often utilizing horses whose only qualification for being bred was a recognizable pedigree and either ovaries or testicles. Breeding the slow to the unsound might sometimes get you something that is neither, but I'm betting a lot of those products of moderate-mare-bred-to-unraced/unaccomplished-son-of-(popular market stallion here) were many steps below G1 caliber. That's OK, though, because there is a viable need in US racing for mediocre horses - probably more so than the actual need for good horses.

Modern racing in the US is different than racing in other nations, as well as to itself in distant days past. It is vast in terms of numbers, and that vastness is made up almost entirely of the claiming races that fill cards. Basically, the unique nature of the US racing industry has created a situation where there's more bulk, but it's made up largely of chaff - and it's what makes the racing machine go. There are owners and breeders who would have a career high if they owned or bred a G3 winner, trainers and riders whose livelihood rests on the backs of horses who couldn't warm up decent stakes horses. Of the tens of thousands of foals born, only a relative handful are born of the stakes-winning/stakes-producing bloodstock which is most likely to produce high-class runners, or will be handled by the high-class connections most likely to campaign high-level horses. Good horses don't appear as if by magic, equally distributed with disregard to origin. There's a reason why the leading trainer/breeder/sire lists are not populated by random different names every year.

Proponents of the "larger crop" theory would have you believe that horses have to distinguish themselves against x times more horses to prove themselves than in previous times. In truth, if you look at the past performances of horses from other days, you will generally note that to advance to races like the classics as a top prospect, you had to have run in more races, against more - and more accomplished - rivals, than is the case now. The fact that there is now a gigantic number of good, bad or indifferent claiming horses overflowing the grounds at any of a number of second-rate tracks doesn't change the fact that there were, are and will be, a relatively small and finite number of "the best" who are competing against each other at the top levels.

That number is certainly larger today than it was in Man o' War's day. There are entire racing circuits that didn't exist then; there is year-round racing; there is effective international racing. There are more divisions today than then; there was no turf racing in the US back then, nor was there much of a division for fillies and mares once the age-restricted prestige races had been run. There was much less specialization; your Cup horse hero Exterminator won his share of races at a mile or a mile and a sixteenth and even beat a decent sprinter in a 6f stakes.

What there is not, however, is 10 times as many horses that are "the best" of the major, historic divisions, nor are there even 10 times as many horses that stand in the way of the few that are.