Sea The Stars' Rating

A great deal has been written over the last few weeks about the 2009 WTRR which assessed Sea The Stars at 136, not all of it totally objective. However many observers and racing enthusiasts have commented that this figure underestimates the ability of the horse and they may be correct.

Unfortunately Handicappers can only assess what the horse has done, NOT what it might be capable of achieving and it is difficult to see on the horse’s results how he could be higher. Most people agree that his best performance was in the Irish Champion Stakes where he beat Fame and Glory (129) by an easy 2.5 lengths and Mastercraftsman (125) by 5 lengths.

I attended the International Handicappers Conference in Hong Kong in December and all 14 delegates agreed that Mastercraftsman should be 125 and that the 2.5 lengths to Fame And Glory should be called 4 pounds as we normally would over that distance making him 129. It was then a question of what we should call the easy 2.5 lengths by which Sea The Stars beat Fame And Glory. In normal circumstances this would be 4 pounds but because of the ease of victory we called it 7 pounds making Sea The Stars 136.

Subsequently we have been accused of having Fame And Glory and Mastercraftsman too high and Sea The Stars too low. This is an interesting theory in that we called the 2.5 lengths to be worth 7 pounds over 1mile 2 furlongs. This gave Sea The Stars credit for a probable 4 length victory. If we expanded the differential any further we would have had to call it 5 lengths or even 6 lengths which would have put the committee into fantasy land and critics would have said our ratings lacked credibility.

There is often very vigorous and sometimes heated debate amongst the International Handicappers in our Hong Kong Conference when we are discussing each others horses and you have to put up a strong case to achieve the rating you want for your domestic horses. On Sea The Stars there was no disagreement, no need for a vote, no doubts about what he had achieved at his best. All 14 members of the committee were unanimous, a very unusual event. The fact that this figure placed him behind great horses of the past was not relevant, 136 was what he achieved at his best and we couldn’t get him any higher.

Part of the problem was that he never met another great horse, by that I mean another horse rated 130+. When Dancing Brave won his Prix De L’Arc de Triomphe there were 5 horses rated at 130+ running in the race. When Dancing Brave beat them out of sight he was always more likely to achieve a higher rating than Sea The Stars could have done. It was not the horse’s fault it was the lack of outstanding opposition which made it impossible to assess him any higher than we did, especially when he never beat that opposition by very far.

I hope this account helps to explain and put into context the difficulties when assessing top horses and comparing them year on year. To score highly they either have to win by wide margins or beat stellar opponents or both. Is there anybody out there who believes that Sea The Stars did that?