There were surely some certainties to arise out of the 39th Breeders' Cup.
Among them is that Flightline will be Horse of the Year.
When the Eclipse Award balloting is announced in January, he should be a unanimous choice—though in this day and age, there's a chance some publicity seeker will cast an odd-ball vote to prevent that from happening.
Yet whether it's a clean sweep or not, the crowning of Flightline will harken back in time to 1954 when Native Dancer was named Horse of the Year off just three races, the same amount the now retired Flightline competed in this year. Aside from them, the second-lowest number of starts by a Horse of the Year in the last 68 years is Ghostzapper (2004) with four, followed by All Along (1983) and Invasor (2006) both with five, which frames the only kind of race left for this modern day megastar.
How will history record where the undefeated son of Tapit stands among the sport's all-time greats? Will his accomplishments—six wins in six starts, four in grade 1 company for trainer John Sadler—withstand the test of time?
Those are the questions that will linger and be debated far longer than Flightline's racing career, which lasted for a little more than 18 months: from his April 24, 2021 debut at 3 until his final start last weekend in the Nov. 5 Breeders' Cup Classic (G1) at Keeneland.
People are asking, "Is he the best horse you've ever seen?"
It's a fair question to ask, even though there's no definitive answer to such a subjective question.
From this perspective, answering that question starts with defining "best." Does it involve time, consistency, and durability? Or is it that champion who on its best day could leave you awed and speechless?
Starting with my introduction to the sport in 1971, the ones who handled the test of time "best" in my opinion are topped by Forego, Affirmed, Spectacular Bid, Cigar, and Zenyatta, in no particular order. They were great horses, no doubt, and among the greatest ever.
But for me the designation of the "best horse I've ever seen" is not as reliant upon career length as it is upon sustained brilliance. It hinges on the ability to run a race that you will never forget and leave you with a feeling that no one in the world—or in recent memory—could beat that illustrious champion on that unforgettable day.
That's why Secretariat is still the "best" horse I've ever seen and I'll put Flightline second off some utterly spectacular victories in his brief but spectacular career.
To explain, let me start at the top. Falling in love with horse racing at the start of the 1970s was a rare gift. In the span of my first 10 years of watching races in New York, I saw three Triple Crown winners in Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed, plus legendary Hall of Famers such as Spectacular Bid, Forego, and Ruffian, other great stars such as Riva Ridge, Bold Forbes, Canonero II, and about two dozen more I cannot mention due to space restrictions. It was a golden age.
Having all of those Hall of Fame-caliber horses in close proximity to each other offered a valuable lesson. As good as Affirmed and Spectacular Bid were at 3, they could not defeat an equally great older rival. Affirmed could not beat a 4-year-old Seattle Slew. A year later, the 3-year-old Spectacular Bid lost to the older and more mature 4-year-old version of Affirmed. The following year, when Spectacular Bid was 4, no one could touch him.
Those lessons enhanced my respect for Secretariat because we never saw him at 4. We were treated to him clinching the Triple Crown by a 31-length margin that may never be matched. Then, in the fall, he clobbered the best older dirt horses in the world in the Marlboro Cup, including his Hall of Fame stablemate Riva Ridge, who might have been a Triple Crown champ himself if not for a wet track in the Preakness Stakes (G1).
He closed out his career in unbelievable fashion, beating North America's best grass runners on turf. While the mind boggles at what Secretariat would have been as a 4-year-old, sweeping the Triple Crown by a record margin, beating older horses in a championship setting, and being named the champion turf runner at 3 and Horse of the Year at 2 and 3 is a superfecta that blows the mind and makes Secretariat my "best horse ever."
Why is Flightline second? Yes, like everyone else, I would have loved to see him race more, but you can't hold one generation to the norms of another. Horses race dramatically less than they did three decades ago. That's a fact. It's the new way of life in the sport. Including Flightline, the last six Horse of the Year winners averaged six starts in that year. Kelso, in his HOY run from 1960-64, averaged about 10.5. Yet fewer races in his career does not mean that Flightline was not as good, if not better than Cigar, the famed winner of 16 straight races, on their best days.
To hold a small body of work against Flightline is not fair. This year, the Lane's End stallion won 3 of the top 5 dirt races of the year for older horses in the Classic, the TVG Pacific Classic (G1), and the Hill 'n' Dale Metropolitan Handicap (G1). Would sprinkling a couple of grade 2 wins in there really change perceptions of him?
Plus, no one can argue with the decision to retire him after the Classic. Though the number of his starts paints him as a 3-year-old, we were able to see him in his full glory as a 4-year-old. Plus, as I mentioned in a previous BloodHorse story, insurance for an active racehorse is capped at $35 million and with Flightline realistically valued at $80 million or more as a stallion, it's ludicrous to ask anyone to assume that kind of financial risk with an animal as fragile as a Thoroughbred racehorse.
EHALT: A Classic Test for Flightline's Greatness
In that same story, it was mentioned how the last horse in the Hall of Fame with less than 10 starts (with heat races added in some cases) was Artfully, a 1902 foal with eight starts. Yet in this era, it would be a surprise if 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify and Flightline, both of whom raced only six times, are not enshrined in their first year of eligibility.
Admittedly, though Flightline raced for slightly less than 10 minutes in his brief career, each second of those races was spellbinding. In every race, he provided the kind of thrills great horses only generate on occasions. Even Secretariat lost, and there times when Spectacular Bid—as dominant as he was with 16 of his 26 wins (out of 30 starts) reaching four lengths or more (not including a walkover)—had to work hard to win by less than two lengths. Yet with Flightline there was never any suspense. He dominated his rivals like no other horse has from his first race through his last.
In those six starts, he won by a combined 71 lengths, for an average of 11.83 lengths per start. As great as Cigar was, his lone win by eight lengths or more came in an allowance race. In his 16-race win streak, he won by 3 1/2 lengths or less 11 times. Secretariat, in his 16 career wins, averaged a margin of six lengths with his epic 31-length score included.
Flightline's smallest margin of victory was six lengths and in his four grade 1 wins, he prevailed by an aggregate of 45 lengths for an average of 11.25 lengths per start.
The quality of a horse's rivals usually has a major impact on the margin of victory, yet in the Pacific Classic the runner-up was Country Grammer , the winner of the $12 million Dubai World Cup Sponsored by Emirates Airline (G1), not a reformed claimer.
Yet the capper for me came less than a week ago in the BC Classic. That field of seven rivals included horses with wins in the Kentucky Derby Presented by Woodford Reserve (G1), Whitney Stakes (G1), Big Ass Fans Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile (G1), Pegasus Word Cup Invitational Stakes (G1), Runhappy Travers Stakes (G1), and Runhappy Santa Anita Derby (G1), plus two winners of the Jockey Club Gold Cup (G1) and Pennsylvania Derby (G1), and Flightline toyed with them.
Foremost among that group was Life is Good , who won 9 of 12 starts and earned $4.5 million. There have been several years in recent history when he would have been Horse of the Year and in the Classic his freakish early speed was seen as an element with the potential to beat Flightline, a 4-year-old bred by co-owner Summer Wind Equine, either head-to-head or weaken him enough so that closers would charge past both of them in the final furlong.
Instead, Flightline cruised just behind Life Is Good in a blistering 1:09.27 for six furlongs and then waved goodbye at the top of the stretch and won by consummate ease as Life Is Good faded to fifth and Olympiad , the aforementioned 2022 Jockey Club Gold Cup winner, finished a very distant second.
That six-furlong split was just .16 slower than the sport's best sprinters needed to cover three-quarters of a mile in the Qatar Racing Breeders' Cup Sprint (G1) earlier in the card. Adding to the moment, in an odd tribute to Flightline and the respect for his speed, when the six-furlong split was originally posted as 1:07.98 there was some disbelief after the race, but not wide-spread ridicule for a time that was incorrectly posted when the outrider passed the timing beam while rushing to help the injured Epicenter .
The times of Flightline's races also speak in glowing terms about how special he was. In the Pacific Classic at Del Mar, not only did he win by the proverbial country mile, but Thoro-Graph, one of the top speed figure services, gave him their best figure ever, a negative-8 1/2. His Beyer Speed Figure was 126, a figure topped only by Ghostzapper in 2004 with a 128 on a sloppy track in the grade 3 Iselin Handicap at Monmouth Park. On the Ragozin Sheets, his Pacific Classic merited a negative-2, positioning him as the only horse in the Classic field with a negative Ragozin number. In both the Thoro-Graph and Ragozin scales, lower numbers are better.
And to think, after that type of performance, Flightline returns and wins the BC Classic by a record margin after contesting that 1:09.27 pace, which was nearly two seconds faster than the 1:11.21 fraction that Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh reeled off in his final start in the 2015 BC Classic at Keeneland.
After posting the record 8 1/2 on Thoro-Graph in the Pacific Classic, it figured his figure in the Classic would regress substantially, yet his final time Saturday of 2:00.05 for the mile-and-a-quarter equated to a 6, virtually matching Vino Rosso (6 1/4 2019) for the service's best figure in the 39-year history of the race.
That's why Flightline is second-best for me. He may not have had the long and glorious career of many great champions, but he did things that at least I believe only one other horse in the last 50 years could match.
That, of course, is just an opinion and I cannot blame anyone for scoffing at that belief and insisting other horses had better or greater careers. Yet with Flightline racing through his 4-year-old season, in terms of age we saw him in his prime and there's no compelling reason to believe that if he had run six more times he would not have retired 12-for-12 instead of 6-for-6.
He was that good. So good that it would be fitting if Flightline receives an honor along the same line as Secretariat, who has a marker at Belmont Park denoting a 31-length margin to the finish line and commemorating Big Red's winning margin in the Belmont Stakes. At Del Mar, they should erect one 19 1/4 lengths from the finish line.
They could simply call it the Flightline.
