Star quality deserves more

So is Sea The Stars really 5lbs inferior to Dancing Brave? Well, the international handicappers think so – or maybe not.

The World Thoroughbred Rankings for 2009 have been unveiled and Sea The Stars is rated 6lbs clear of any horse on the planet. So far, so predictable and he has also been raised 1lb from the rating he was accorded when he was when he was retired from racing in October. But that mark of 136, the highest awarded since Peintre Celebre was rated at 137 in 1997, still puts him 5lbs behind Dancing Brave, the winner of the 1986 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

Certainly that was a vintage renewal, Dancing Brave beat a field that included seven individual Group One winners, but does that mean that Sea The Stars would only be running for place money and beaten three lengths? Well, even the experts are not sure on that one.

In a statement on handicapping practice they point out that assessments of top horses both globally and across the generations has been something of an evolutionary process. It began with the establishment of the International Classifications in 1977 – which only included Britain, France and Ireland – and has since grown into the World Thoroughbred Racehorse Rankings, which started in 2004 and is compiled by a global Handicapping Committee composed of 14 official handicappers.

Those handicappers now accept that that the level of ratings that operated in the first 15 years of the International Classification is not consistent with the level of ratings that has operated since the early 1990s to the present time. This leaves open to question whether the ratings of Dancing Brave (141 in 1986), Alleged (140, 1978), Shergar (140, 1981), and El Gran Senor (138, 1984) would have been achieved were those horse racing today.

The Rankings are all about assessing performance at the very top of racing’s pyramid – sifting the best from the rest – and there are two ways of achieving that in terms of a high rating. Shergar dominated the 1980 Derby, winning by 10 lengths, albeit from what may not have been the best Derby field ever assembled, while Dancing Brave’s rating is based on defeating a stellar cast of contemporaries of proven merit in the Arc.

Sea The Stars was never likely to achieve a visually impressive winning margin. Michael Kinane, his jockey, reckoned that “he’ll never win by more than two lengths”. He was proved fractionally wrong, by another half-length in the Irish Champion Stakes, but it was partly the way in which Kinane conserved the horse’s resources that enabled Sea The Stars to go through his three-year-old season unbeaten – something which eluded both Shergar and Dancing Brave.  

However, those narrow-margin victories – such as beating Rip Van Winkle by a length in the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park – present an imponderable conundrum to those who would assess the final borders of this horse’s talent. Just how do you measure that which cannot be seen in definite terms?

No horse last season took Sea The Stars to the brink. Mastercraftsman provided something close to a test in the International Stakes at York, even making Kinane raise his whip, after Sea The Stars had eased into second place at no more than a canter just when Johnny Murtagh kicked on Mastercraftsman. Sea The Stars went from a length-and-a-half down with a furlong to run to a length up at the line and the course record was broken.

However, that has not been enough for Sea The Stars to break into the elite.  As the statement explains: “Handicappers can quantify the ability of an extravagant winner who ‘ shows his hand’ and equally a horse who is ‘all out ‘ in victory but the winner who keeps something in reserve is far more problematic . In domestic handicaps, a handicapper is obliged to give each horse in a handicap an equal chance of winning and therefore is obliged to estimate the true margin of superiority of the snug winner in order to achieve the purpose of a handicap.”

This limitation of ratings as a measurement of horses across the years was encapsulated by Geoffrey Gibbs, a former International Classification Committee Chairman, who once wrote:  “There is some confusion as to what a rating now represents and as to the purpose of the Classifications. Many people believe a rating to represent the absolute inherent ability of a particular Thoroughbred and therefore, the Classifications to represent the qualitative assessment of the breed in any one year or as between one year and another.

“This view is no longer sustainable, as a rating is now primarily a measurement of relative performance and only in particular circumstances will it demonstrate the ultimate inherent ability of a particular Thoroughbred. This being the case, Classifications are now a retrospective measurement of performances, not necessarily the inherent abilities of those Thoroughbreds included. True inherent ability can only be gauged when horses compete directly with one another.”

The argument runs that if it is difficult to separate champions of the same era, as evidenced the intense current debate in concerning whether Zenyatta or Rachel Alexandra should be Horse of the Year in America illustrates, how much more difficult is it to separate champions from different eras?

Well, try this. If Dancing Brave were to meet Sea The Stars, over ten furlongs on good to firm ground and having to concede those 5lbs, which one would you be backing?

 
WORLD THOROUGHBRED RANKINGS

 Paul Wheeler