Sea The Stars: at least one performance is that of a great champion
PICTURE: EDWARD WHITAKERSea The Stars is a great but not best we've seen
Racing Post historian and statistician says the Arc hero can only be judged on quality of performance and not on the races he has won
IN the aftermath of the Arc, Sea The Stars can be clearly identified as a great champion, perhaps the best of the decade – but not, as the hype merchants insist, the horse of a lifetime.
A great horse is a rarity who is far above the usual run of champions and would be supreme in most years. There have been only five such paragons on the Flat in Europe in the last dozen years – in chronological order, Daylami, Montjeu, Dubai Millennium, Sakhee and Sea The Stars.
Sea The Stars belongs comfortably in that company because he has put up at least one performance which can be identified as that of a great champion.
It is therefore not an insult to say that he cannot compare with Sea-Bird, Ribot and Mill Reef, the three best 1m4f horses to race in Europe since World War II – especially as his best two performances have come at 1m2f.
Sea The Stars’s exact place in the equine pantheon depends on how greatness in the thoroughbred is measured. There is a big difference between the majority, who assess horsessuperficially, according to the prestige of the races they have won, and those who judge them by the only criterion that matters: quality of performance, which is best measured by means of ratings.
Racing Post Ratings (RPRs) have beencompiled since 1988, and in that time the best 1m4f figures have been achieved by Generous (137), Peintre Celebre (137) and Montjeu (136).
In the 1999 book A Century of Champions, using a scale which was probably a couple of pounds higher than the RPR scale, Tony Morris and I ranked the 200 best Flat horses in the world since 1900.
Our top-rated post-war European 1m4f champions were Sea-Bird (145), Ribot (143), Mill Reef (141) and Nijinsky, Dancing Brave, Vaguely Noble and Shergar (all 140).
These lists omit Brigadier Gerard, Daylami and Dubai Millennium, who excelled over shorter distances, and Sea The Stars himself, whose two best RPRs have been achieved in the Irish Champion Stakes (138) and the Eclipse (135), both over 1m2f.
However the calculations are made, super-champions sprint away from top-class rivals and crush them by wide margins in a way that Sea The Stars never has.
Ribot won his second Arc in 1956 when beating Britain’s champion three-year-old Talgo by an official distance of six lengths (photos show it was eight or nine lengths); Sea-Bird equalled that record margin in the 1965 Arc when trouncing the strongest international field ever assembled for one race; and Mill Reef raced home by three lengths in 1971.
Sea The Stars’s most ardent supporters argue that ratings do not do him justice, but the bottom line is that he cannot be given credit for what he has not achieved.
Assessment of Sea The Stars is further complicated by the fact that, with the exception of Sakhee, he is unique among great Arc winners in winning the race with a performance below his best. Youmzain, Cavalryman and Conduit fought it out for second place behind him, and they are not within two lengths of being great champions.
Youmzain and Conduit both gave 8lb to Sea The Stars – so are they inferior to him at all?
Sea The Stars’s reputation is secure, but reputations are based partially on popularity and hype and can therefore be misleading.
Sir Ivor, Nashwan, Rock Of Gibraltar and others are often described as great champions without having achieved a single performance good enough to justify that reputation. On the other hand, Vaguely Noble, Alleged, Sakhee and other great Arc winners seldom get the credit they deserve.
All of us racing fans get carried away with enthusiasm in the heat of the moment – that is part of being a fan – but it is the function of a historian to place current events in their proper perspective, and to provide an antidote to hype.
People believe what they want to believe, but some of the hype surrounding Sea The Stars’s Arc victory bordered on the hysterical, being uttered by people who seemed to think that racing started in 1990.
Forinstance, the BBC’s TV coverage contained these remarks: “That is one of the greatest sporting performances in any field in any part of the world that you will ever, ever see . . . We may have seen the greatest ever . . . This is truly the horse of a lifetime . . . This is the best horse I think we’ll ever see.”
American or Japanese observers who saw Sea The Stars for the first time in the Arc, and heard comments like that, must have wondered ifthey had been watching the same race.
