Football
Bill Finley 17y

Does talent equal greatness?

Come early Saturday evening, Bernardini will likely have finished off his career with a flourish, a dominating performance in the Breeders' Cup Classic. The accolades and superlatives will then flow. Barring a defeat, which there is no reason to expect, he will become the 2006 Horse of the Year in waiting and, more significantly, will be widely and correctly regarded as one of the most talented horses ever.

But does talent equal greatness? As much as racing has changed over the last decade or two, that's a very tricky question. The modern horse is the apple. The horse from a bygone era is the orange. Maybe you can't compare them, but I prefer oranges to apples.

Nothing is official yet, but it is a foregone conclusion that Bernardini will be retired after the Breeders' Cup. He will be retired because all star horses are retired as soon as possible these days. A racing career has become a mere audition for the breeding shed, where the real money is made. Even a billionaire like Sheikh Mohammed, who owns Bernardini, will not ignore the economic practicalities involved. What that means is that Bernardini will have run a grand total of eight times over a career that spanned a few days shy of 10 months.

Of course, in that short and sweet time, he packed in a number of accomplishments. He has won the Withers, Preakness, Jim Dandy, Travers and Jockey Club Gold Cup. He won each race with ease and was dominant. He doesn't just beat his opponents. He embarrasses them.

Conformation, ability, desire, pedigree, he is as perfect as a horse gets.

"He has the complete package, physically," John Ferguson, the bloodstock manager at Darley Stable, which owns Bernardini, told the New York Times. "Everything, from head to toe, is in the right place and in proportion. He's one of the very few horses in the last 50 years that ticks every box."

You might say there's at least one box missing -- longevity.

Kelso was a great horse. He ran 63 times and won 39 races. He won on turf and dirt and with as much as 136 pounds on his back. The same jockey Club Gold Cup that Bernardini won? Kelso won it five straight times.

"You can't compare a horse like Bernardini to the horses of years ago," said Carl Hanford, the trainer of Kelso. "If he would go again and run the next couple of years, that might give him a shot. But the damn breeding industry has taken over the racetrack. You can't say he's another Kelso. If he had another 10-12 races and raced a few more years it would be different. But you can't compare them."

Kelso was a gelding, so there was no rush to retire him. But what about great horses like Citation and Whirlaway? What about great horses from fairly recent times like Affirmed, Spectacular Bid and Cigar? Of those three, Affirmed made the fewest lifetime starts with 29. That's more than three times as many career starts as Bernardini will have made.

Unless there is a phenomenal gelding out there somewhere or there is a radical shift in the economics of the game that makes stallions less valuable, no top horse will ever run 29 times again.

Does that mean no horse can ever again deserve the title of greatness? I'm not sure I have that answer. Perhaps the definition of greatness needs to be changed; weakened, you might say.

I know that Bernardini is among the best horses I have ever seen. Is he a great horse? I'm not so sure.

Notes
Wayne Lukas has just one Breeders' Cup starter this year in Juvenile candidate Pegasus Wind. But it is enough to keep his record intact of having had a starter in all 23 runnings of the Breeders' Cup.

With Pat Day's retirement last year, no jockey has ridden in every Breeders' Cup. Only three jockeys who rode in the inaugural Breeders' Cup are still active. They are: Pat Valenzuela, Charles Woods Jr. and James McKnight.

Only two winners from the first Breeders' Cup are still alive -- Classic winner Wild Again and Distaff winner Princess Rooney. The two were once mated, but the mating did not produce a foal. Princess Rooney is pensioned at Gentry Brothers Farm in Kentucky. Wild Again is pensioned at Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky.

There are 15 Classic winners still active at stud and they are spread around the world. Alysheba is in Saudi Arabia, while Volponi is in Korea. Concern, the 1994 Classic winner, wound up in the strangest place of them all. He stands at stud in Oklahoma, at the Equine Lameness Center.

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