Rising to the Occasion
Who else has been pushed to the edge of their ability? (Sarah K. Andrew)
While having a lovely lunch with a few racing pals the other day, we discussed the past year and decade (along with sports betting, betting on reality TV shows, TV shows in general and the surprising high quality of the pea soup). As the conversation turned to Rachel Alexandra’s spectacular campaign I asked my esteemed colleagues, all long time fans, if they could recall another campaign where a horse was pushed right up to the edge of their ability as Rachel was.
Beyer recently mentioned that he thought Rachel’s campaign was the best for any US based filly:
Her campaign was, in my opinion, the best ever by a U.S.-based filly. The other great fillies of the modern era — such as Ruffian, Personal Ensign, Lady’s Secret and Azeri — made their reputations by dominating members of their own sex but didn’t distinguish themselves against males. Rachel Alexandra challenged males in three Grade I stakes — the Preakness, the Haskell Invitational and the Woodward — and won them all. She trounced Summer Bird, the best male 3-year-old, by six lengths. Overall, she won her eight starts by a combined total of 65 lengths.
After some deliberation and discussion, Ouija Board was mentioned as potentially being pushed to the edge of her ability, but our discussion was cut short by the arrival of the food.
So, I ask you dear readers, can you think of any successful campaigns, where a horse of any class has been challenged more often than not and rose to occasion? What say you?
Posted by dana on Dec 29 2009
Filed Under: Rachel Alexandra, Summer Bird, 2009, Impressive, Sarah K. Andrew, Legend, Racing
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I would nominate the 4 year old campaign of Invasor, one of my personal favorites. Racing in the US for the first time, Invasor won the Grade 1 Pimplico, than the Grade 1 Suburban, than the Grade 1 Whitney and outdueled Bernardini down the stretch to win the Breeders Cup Classic. Than in his next start as a 5 year old he wins the Dubai World Cup. Starting as a unknown to US fans, I think the horse was run brilliantly and pushed to his limits.
The most memorable campaign to me was that of Cigar in 1995 when he culminated his undefeated season with Tom Durkins unforgettable call in the BC Classic. He took on all comers that year.
excellent, thx Robert & hoofprints!
last night on Twitter folks also mentioned Forego, Gamely, Majestic Prince, Quicken Tree, Bug Brush, Silver Spoon & Golikova… I’ll provide some links later on.
I see you’ve started a few new racing iniatives….whatever happened to the Self Appointed Fan Committee and monthly reports to the powers that be? I thought that was a good program you had going….I see Lisa still posts a link on her blog to SAFC…what up? Did it not get the response(s) you were looking for or were the topics too broad? Just curious, I guess.
G-train - wow, I’m sort of taken aback by your question… not so much the question itself by the randomness of it. It’s been on my to do list to update the SAFC “SAFC is on hiatus”. Guess I better do that…
But since you asked, after the BC last year when we were lucky enough to get a sit down with them and we asked people to submit their issues for the BC we got a whopping 27 submissions. With all the complaining going on at the time I would have expected or at least hoped for more. It made it hard to make a case for things when only 27 people took it upon themselves to contribute.
http://www.greenbutgame.org/2008/11/17/breeders-cup-meeting-recap/
After the BC the number of contributions we were getting were pretty low so and then pretty much stopped. I still believe in the project and hope to revive it in a more automated way that also includes some Digg-like capability but HRF is my main goal now.
Does anyone else have anything they want to know?
Sorry for the random comment. I thought it was a great concept and was hoping it wasn’t abandoned…cuz it seemed to be a good vehicle to send feedback to the racing lords. I promise I’ll email my random thoughts in the future. :)
6uess my G-Train went off the rails there.
LOL, the G-train in nyc is known to do the same thing!
Not abandoned, but definitely on hiatus, and the homepage is now updated to reflect that! I think the racing lords were more receptive than fans were, or perhaps a better way to put it was that the racing lords seemed very interested and happy for the feedback but we didn’t get the kind of wider fan adoption that we thought we would. We had our few regular contributors such as yourself but we thought we’d get more of it.
SAFC will be back at some point, hopefully using something like this a back end to make it easier to search for contributions, vote on them etc… we launched the current version in about 2 weeks, ha ha!
http://www.pligg.com/
(sort of an open source Digg)