Privman: Let the Horse of the Year Debate Begin

[Merlinsky]

Originally Posted by Danzig

i know there was a lot of discussion about it on the message board. tons of folks were unhappy that a horse with zero open races was in the running for hoy. but the group of males that year had spotty records-street cry tailed off after a good spring, left bank made a brief impressive fall run. hers was the only good, year-long campaign.
and i believe ghostzapper won hoy with only four races that year he got the award. some wanted him to get hoy the following year with just a met mile under his belt.

Yeah I had a rant about the 4 race thing for Ghostzapper, but I deleted it because it was going on too long, and I was trying to write about Azeri. Running in so few races leading to HOY requires an insane amount of dominance, and even then it's still unsatisfying. I know folks love Uncle Mo, for example, and I really enjoyed what he did as a 2yo, but when I hear HOY speculation for him it just seems bizarre. Favorite Trick got it undefeated as a 2yo over Skip Away, but he ran 8 times to earn it. I don't care if Uncle Mo is the second coming of Seattle Slew--he's run 3 times. You can be a 2yo baby to justify that number of starts, and it'll get you 2yo champ, but Horses of the Year shouldn't win like that. I'd say he needs another G1, maybe a couple more starts, and all the BCC favorites off the board. They bend over backwards wanting an older male dirt router for the HOY. If they hadn't had one, they'd go with Zenyatta over Uncle Mo.

One thing about GZ, he did win from 7 to 10 furlongs in 2004 so I want to give him credit for that range. Also, he seemed so fast that he might honestly have hurt himself if he ran every 3-4 weeks. In a way he did after his Met Mile. Those bones can only stand up to so much, and he had pretty crazy Beyers, e.g a 128 in the Iselin. Letting him do what he wanted to do and letting him do it too often might've caused something catastrophic. I think they were protecting him from himself.