I had the privilege of meeting bc the day after ascot and I saw frankel on the gallops a couple of times, one time getting a talk through the string by the assistant. I think she was a good horse but nothing special in terms of Australian sprinters and as you all know I don't rate her compared to frankel. What she did was a good achievement though. (Obviously I saw frankel at the guineas as well and when he did racecourse gallops as a 4yo but not counting those)

Oh Ubar not again mate get your tin hat on INCOMING

Well Sea The Stars' 3yo campaign was super freaky and he was incredible in his time. Real shame he went off to stud so early, would've really made an impact in 2010 I bet.

Though not complaining too much since he's proving to be a very very good sire, perhaps he'll catch his illustrious brother one day on that count!

Frankel is on par with him I'd say, they were both so dominant it's hard to put them apart.

Also, I think Rachel Alexandra deserves some commendation for her incredible 3yo season over in the states.

For me this is a fairly conclusive end to the Frankel/BC debate- these are their sectionals from Ascot taken from the British Champions series website. They are the 6f for BC and the final 5f for Frankel plus his starting furlong. As you can see they both remarkably get identical times. However for me the key points in the race I've highlighted in red- as you can see between the 4f and the 2f markers Frankel runs over 1.2 seconds faster over the two furlongs than BC- that's equivalent to about 20m, or near to 6 lengths of ground made up over two furlongs. Once you factor out the fact that Frankel would have been ridden more conservatively in his opening furlong, ran 2 furlongs further than BC and ran the last furlong and a half entirely alone, not ridden hard over the final half furlong, you can see it would have been a fairly one sided race, much more so than the SO6 promotional video made it out to be. If he had put in that burst whilst racing her, it would have either killed her off trying to live with him or if she was held back she would never have caught him.

Times are irrelevant in british racing. Frankel a best time over 1mile came on the row let mile, a very stiff mule with an uphill finish, which he did entirely on his own. In the juddmonte he was never really asked to give everythibg, and could certainly have run faster. I don't know where secretariat ran 2:24 on turf but firm dirt will ride much faster, and the turf will almost always be very fast, and the tracks are flat, which all makes a big difference. Add to this the fact that the way is races are run is likely to produce quicker times as they are generally run very differently to uk races and you see that really times are incomparable. Declaration of war, 3rd in last years bc classic, ran 5s quicker at Santa Anita than he did at york. Also, frankels fastest time over '1mile2' was actually over 1mile 5/16, york is further than 1mile2. That is worth at least 5s, as shown by declaration of war.

As Ubar said, the race at York where Frankel won is actually run over the extended 1m2f110y ay York. Also, in the races you're comparing over that distance, Frankel carried 131lb, while Secretariat only carried 126lb. As Ubar also said, Frankel won many of his races with great ease, and not really under any pressure from the jockey - times are really not so important in UK racing, so the jockey wasn't going to push him harder unnecessarily, as doing so could have damaged the horse, and would probably have given the jockey a ban.

I know times are important in the US, but that's because all of the courses are flat ovals and they can all be compared to each other. In the UK, all courses are unique; they all have undulations of some sort, they are all different shapes, and some of them have significant uphill sections (Ascot and both Newmarket courses, for example, have uphill sections leading to the last furlong, so stamina is always necessary on those courses).

I'm a fan of US racing, but using timings to compare US horses to UK horses just doesn't work.

There hasn't been a single Australian horse in the top five finishers in the Melbourne Cup for the last three runnings. The last Australian horse in the top five was in 2010, and the last Australian winner was in 2009.

European horses are totally dominant in the Melbourne Cup these days, and the thing is, many of these horses that are dominating the race placings are really no better that Group 3 standard. I think this is the problem with having the race as a handicap. The race should switch to being a weight-for-age race, to encourage the very best stayers from Europe and Japan to take on the top Australian stayers each year. At the moment, for anyone outside of Australia, the race is really just an extremely valuable handicap; it certainly doesn't attract the world's top stayers.

Exactly, hence why many average staying handicappers are brought to run in that race. It would be great to see the likes of Estimate, Leading Light ect go over there if it was level weights.

It's not actually a race for stayers anyway, the way the race is run it's on the whole a race for slow 1m4-1m6 horses, only making it wfa would attract genuinely high quality stayers, as at the moment the weights are biased against the british/Irish trained horses so the likes of estimate etc. are highly unlikely to ever consider a race like that. When Yeats went over he did not carry a particularly high weight but compared to the others in the race it was ridiculous

My Top 5 of All Time:
1) Frankel
2) Man O' War
3) Black Caviar
4) Secretariat
5) Ribot

Black Caviar - Are u having a laugh

That 100l race was a farce, only one other runner who was put in so it wasn't a walkover, but clearly he was exceptional, its very hard to compare pre-war horses to modern day horses though, a lot has changed since then, training breeding etc. I generally try not to look at anything pre 1950 when comparing, when Timeform ratings started is probably as early as I'd go.

That is why I make a lot of my own figures. Something interesting about him is that the winning times were very close to winning times now, something that is hard to say for so many. He won at 1 1/2 miles in 2:28.4 at Belmont Park, slightly faster than this years Belmont Stakes. And he comes from the Godolphin Arabian sire-line, one that is nearly dead in the US and around the world.

Also, for many races he was carrying by far the most weight, carried 130 for most, and even carried 135 and 138 too. Just an exceptional horse.



Maybe hehe. I actually think her Diamond Jubilee win pushes her in the top 5 (in my opinion, and one that hurts me to say cause there are so many good horses I am leaving out, Phar Lap, Zenyatta, Kelso, Nearco, War Admiral, West Australian, Gainsborough, Nijinsky just to name a few). Winning in a kinda weak Australia is one thing, being undefeated there is another, but coming from another hemisphere to beat some of the best in the world, that puts her over.

She won 25 races from 25, how can she not be in the top 5?

By that logic kincsem from Hungary should be by far and away the best with 55 wins from 55 starts.