1980s Yet to Produce an Exceptional 2-Year-Old

When a generation of horses is an unexceptional, unexciting group, racing fans customarily grumble and wait till next year, knowing that the sport tends to run in cycles. But when the country’s thoroughbreds seem subpar for a number of years, that may signify a trend.

Certainly, the 2-year-olds in America this season--the horses who will be contesting the Triple Crown series next spring--don’t seem any more distinguished than the other crops of the 1980s.

In fact, they may be worse.

The 2-year-old title will undoubtedly go to Capote, trainer Wayne Lukas’ colt who won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last month. For him to be a champion is an indictment of his entire generation.

Capote was blessed with an optimal set of conditions at Santa Anita. The track was giving a tremendous advantage to frontrunners, and he was able to take an early lead without any real pressure. Under the circumstances, he might have delivered a blockbuster performance. But Capote scored by a modest margin in dismal time; in fact, he ran three-fifths of a second slower than the 2-year-old filly Brave Raj one race later.

Yet no one else has shown much more talent than Capote. Earlier in the year, Gulch looked like a colt with a bright future, but he couldn’t carry his speed a distance and was soundly beaten in the Breeders’ Cup. No talented late bloomers have surfaced in the important year-end stakes for 2-year-olds, such as the Remsen in New York. It’s a lousy group.

This may sound like an old, familiar refrain; indeed, I wrote the same thing after Tasso won the 1985 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile with a mediocre performance. But this opinion is not the product of a negative outlook on life. There is objective evidence that American horses are getting worse.

The speed figures earned by such recent champions as Capote, Tasso and Chief’s Crown wouldn’t have been good enough to put a horse in the top dozen in most years of the 1970s. Their figures are at least 10 lengths slower than legitimate top-class horses should earn.

Perhaps we were spoiled by the 1970s, the “decade of champions” that produced Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Alydar and Spectacular Bid. They were horses who were not only brilliant but consistent--they sustained their excellence over two or three seasons.

There are few brilliant horses on the lists of champion 2- and 3-year-olds in the 1980s. The very best of them (Devil’s Bag, Conquistador Cielo, Spend a Buck) managed to sustain their brilliance for only a few weeks or months.

The majority of Eclipse Award champions and classic winners have simply been the best of a mediocre lot.

Why hasn’t America produced a great horse in the 1980s? Is this an aberration or a trend?

There is one logical reason to suggest that it may be a trend. The domination of the main American yearling sales by foreign buyers started in the late 1970s, and since that time the best American pedigrees have gone to England to race in the colors of Robert Sangster, the Maktoum brothers of Dubai and various Arab princes and sheiks.

Twenty-three of the 30 yearlings who sold for $1 million or more last year went abroad. Foreign buyers not only skimmed the cream off the top, they also bought heavily in the middle of the market. American racing has been left with fewer good horses than it had in the 1970s.

Perhaps a flock of Seattle Slews and Spectacular Bids will appear on the American scene in coming years and explode this theory. But, at the moment, it seems a reasonable explanation for the nature of American racing in the 1980s, and it is not likely to be refuted by the current crop of 2-year-olds.