Ruffian - maybe the greatest debut of all-time

[classhandicapper]

Originally Posted by The Indomitable DrugS

That was one thing Zenyatta always had going for her, her performances were so mediocre and relatively slow that they were easy to come back from. Look at her after those California wins - she comes prancing back looking like she wasn't even in a horse race. After the BC Classic - she came back hot and dirty - looking so tired that if you sprayed her with a hose you might knock her over. Those are the type of efforts horses don't always come back from - especially females.

We will have to agree to disagree on the details of this while agreeing on the major point being made.

I don't think her performances were mediocre. They were also great, but they were different because of the nature of the surface and the details of her races.

I think the quality of horses in front of her were sometimes vastly inferior (partly because she was so great) and also hell bent on slowing down the pace relative to their own norms because they knew that was the only chance they had to beat her.

As a result of those race developments, it would often be somewhere between difficult and impossible for any horse that ever lived to run fast in totality (especially for her given her deep closing style). As a result she only ran really really fast for the last 2-4 furlongs while making her typical wide sweep and then went out extremely well after the wire with plenty of stamina in reserve.

That is partly the nature of both turf and synthetic racing and probably why turf horses also seem to hold their form better.

Plus, they specifically designed a well spaced campaign with a limited number of taxing races so she'd hold her form until the end of the year and peak around BC time instead of the spring/summer.