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Statistics, Shmatistics.
STS beat a 125 rated (I think) horse by 2L, getting 8 lbs. Does this mean that Youmzain was the best horse in the race at the weights?
Sorry, I only really follow the jumps, so don’t know how 2L equates over 1m 4f..
Anyway. whatever, b*gger the figures, that was a ‘hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck’ race and a great moment in racing history.
The WFA scale is designed so that horses are effectively running off level weights.
He should be given a RPR of around 129, less than Zarkava, but of course he won’t be because RPR compilers can’t be seen to make mistakes so they keep rolling with their own flawed opinions and hope they get away with it.
I don’t know of any handicappers – other than some of the amateur ones on the Betfair forum and in the media – who will reckon that Sea The Stars ran better on paper today than he did in the Eclipse and Irish Champion Stakes. But he did show again that he can triumph in adversity and in thrilling style. It seems as if you can throw pretty much anything at him and he will cope with it.
Yes i agree, Sea the Stars was amazing and the way Mick Kinane rode him was briliant! I prefer the jumps but have really enjoyed the flat season
I think Rip Van Winkle is a bit special Pru and that the Eclipse may well have been STS’s finest hour.
I would be wary of taking RVW on in the US if I were the STS team.
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I think Rip Van Winkle is a bit special Pru and that the Eclipse may well have been STS’s finest hour.
I think it may have been, too. RVW has been the only horse to get StS working hard, at least for a few strides, and Eclipse day was the one we all knew just what sort of animal this was. Though doubtless he’s improved a few pounds since, Mick Kinane said that he thought today was StS’s "easiest" victory, which is worth taking seriously.
Doubtless the debate will go on for decades as to how good this awe-inspiring horse has really been. Nothing can take anything away from the sight of him casually side-stepping between those two good fillies and strolling away from a good field, after all that fighting for his head, and from what had looked to be such a poor position.
Personally, I too feel that there would be a "rightness" to finishing his career today. Forget the Breeders Cup: it could add nothing.
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If there is a realistic chance of meeting either Zenyatta or Rachel Alexandra then a trip to the Breeders’ Cup should be under serious consideration. There are some, I’m sad to say, who still don’t appreciate just what he’s achieved and a victory over the US’s supposed wonder fillies would seal his place in history. A defeat would cost him nothing.
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There are some, I’m sad to say, who still don’t appreciate just what he’s achieved and a victory over the US’s supposed wonder fillies would seal his place in history. A defeat would cost him nothing.
"Some" might mean Americans, I suppose. Yet we this side are expected to know something about Rachel Alexandra and Zemyatta, whose careers we’ve followed with pleasure.
Of course virtually none of our friends over there seriously think of sending their wonder horses to contest the Arc, or the King George; and many of them scream blue murder at the idea of those Polytrack surfaces which are making their own playing fields a little less biased towards the home side.
A defeat might not cost the horse anything, true – but it would cost his admirers a great deal. And a win would seem curiously irrelevant to his heroic achievement.
He should be given a RPR of around 129, less than Zarkava, but of course he won’t be because RPR compilers can’t be seen to make mistakes so they keep rolling with their own flawed opinions and hope they get away with it.
Zarkava probably had the 3lb fillies allowance factored into her rating, which obviously means RPR should give STS a maximum rating of 132 if they are sensible. But with STS already having a highest RPR in the high 130’s, we will all probably be told Youmzain ran a career best yesterday by RPR’s. As a result STS will probably be rated the best Arc winner by RPR since RPR began.
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Why should Sea The Stars get a lower RPR than Zarkava, Zarkava?
Very interesting defensive headline from Willoughby in the Post today ‘A horse who is always better than the bare result’. He knows only too well that if you took the bare form it doesn’t compare with several of the past ‘greats’. Racing Post are quoting a figure for the Arc of 131-133 – why the banding I have no idea but with Zarkava only on 129 I think it is a lot nearer 131 than 133. Mysteriously, they have given him a rating of 138 for his Leopardstown defeat of Fame And Glory who was running over a trip short of his best. I have no idea how that performance could be considered 7lbs better than Arc run.
I have no idea how people can’t see that the Eclipse and Irish Champion Stakes efforts are well in advance of his Arc form.
The "mystery" is surely that they have gone back and rated Sea The Stars’ Irish Champion win higher in the light of the Arc. Handicaps should be dynamic things, but that just smacks of them having come round to the view that they were too low in the first place. Unfortunately, I have no idea whether the whole race has been reassessed, as RPRs are no longer freely available.
If you don’t think that an Irish Champion win by very clear margins all the way back trumps –
on bare form
and by some way – an Arc win in which loads of horses (some of them second- if not third-rate) have finished close up then I doubt anything I could say would change your mind.
^ replying to the last paragraph
…yet he beat Fame and Glory further in the Arc than he did in the Irish Champion, the race which seems to be singled out as his best effort to date.
I’ve just been reading the latest Racing Post Ratings "World Class" article.
This quote gets me.
"In light of the continued brilliance of John Oxx’s colt, his peak figure from the Irish Champion Stakes has been raised a pound to 138, making him the clear best three-year-old in RPR history."
That just suggests they’ve raised the mark from the Irish Champion Stakes for no good reason other than to try to say he’s the best 3yo in RPR history. Next someone will tell me the race had a "form boost" when Mastercraftsman won at Dundalk on Friday when he had something like a stone in hand on everything else.
^ replying to the last paragraph
…yet he beat Fame and Glory further in the Arc than he did in the Irish Champion, the race which seems to be singled out as his best effort to date.
Indeed he did.
Such one-on-one comparisons are open to massive misinterpretation. You could make a case for pretty much any horse being better than any other horse by selective, or just plain clumsy, extrapolation.
There were 17 other horses in the race. That’s 171 one-on-one comparisons in all. All of those horses had run in other races in which similar remarks applied. The race itself had been run dozens of times before with measurable outcomes that have been repeated to greater or lesser degrees.
Faced with a choice between a) putting a race into its proper context by calling on all available relevant information and b) hoping that a comparison between two isolated horses within that race holds true, which do you think makes more sense?
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