Re: Another Frankel!

Not today is he a stone behind Frankel if time means anything.

In around 30 years of following horse racing in the UK I have come to conclude that winning times for races on a year in year out basis, and for track records, are more or less bollocks when trying to evaluate relative merits.

If you look at athletics, when competitors are in a big final and "eyeballs out" over shorter distances, you can more or less set your watch on who will win based on their personal best times. If you watch those same athletes farting around in the races with less importance attached the times are often shockingly far away from what they are capable of, particularly in longer, more tactical affairs. Bring that to horse racing with all the elements that can affect a time and it becomes way less reliable, although you could perhaps argue that horses over sprint distances are pretty much flat out all the way. Having said that Dandy Boy clocked a faster time than Black Caviar at Royal Ascot last year, on the same day, so are we to assume he is the better horse?

The horses he defeated today and the ones he faces in the future will determine where Dawn Approach sits on the all-time list. I suspect he beat moderate opponents today. Toronado was bitterly disappointing after all the hype. He was beaten some way out and I don’t think he ever travelled like he would win it today. O’Briens team had a look about it before the race that he had passed his entire three year old string of colts through a gold pan and these were the three tiny nuggets he found that had any shine to them. They pretty much ran as if that was the case as well, not disgraced but not the contenders he has had in previous seasons.

It might well have been the case that we would see Dawn Approach tackle his elders and give us some indication of the relative merits of successive generations, sadly, it would seem that many of last year’s three year old colts, over a mile at least, are now licking ice creams on Blackpool Beach for a living