G1Select

The only explanation I can offer is that it's the first time, in Aust at least, that she's had a brutal early tempo. First two wins in Aust where around 101.5 rating for me, but she was back in slowly run races, with super sectionals and no real opportunity to show the full extent of what she could do. She had an even tempo in the Turnbull and elevated to 104.3. Got a hot tempo in the Cox Plate and made a huge leap. Totally unpredictable of course, but it's one angle... to say she has this incredible engine inside, and it's only in the highest pressure of situations where a race is set up to run the fastest possible overall time that every runner is capable of that we see the full extent of what a horse is capable of. Obviously they also have to be feeling 100% on the day. Truth is that 99.999% of our races are won in much slower time than the horses are truly capable of, due to the influence of pace. It's why we often see a bunch of relatively average horses run fast times that standout at a meeting and it's because they got an unusually fast pace. They're no chance of repeating that time when the pace is more even, and that's where people come unstuck following time ratings without considering other things. I digress.... When you put top class horses in a scenario where a race is set up to run hot time, we truly see what elite thoroughbreds are capable of running. The problem is that it doesn't happen anywhere near often enough, hardly ever in fact. Of course, most top class horses aren't capable of doing what Via Sistina did, but the point is that our racing here in Australia doesn't offer enough instances where races are set up via early pace to see the full extent of what each horse is capable of. Saturday's race showed that. Of course, they're not machines, and there's still an element of variance and spike performances in a horse's career. That applies to Via on Saturday as well. I'd bet she doesn't get close to that again, but I'll be surprised if she doesn't run much better than her next best 104.3 rating in the future. Did the extra work on Tuesday positively impact her aerobic capacity? What did she run, about 4000m at reportedly 16-18 secs to the furlong? I've said for years that the quick backup from a race is underutilised. Maybe there's an element of that in the work she did on Tuesday that is largely untested and unknown in racehorse training? Incidentally, the same high-pressure scenario unearthed Winx in her first Cox Plate from a very good to a superstar horse. Exposed to the fastest race of her career, she elevated massively on her past form. Time would prove that even though she was elite in all scenarios, her dominance was so much more in races where she had a fast pace to absorb as opposed to other races run at a slower to even speed. Her 8L Cox Plate win in 2016 was a ridiculously fast early speed. The more confusing one for me will forever be Shelby Sixty Six: from a Class 2 Highway win to narrowly missing against Eduardo at WFA and beating home Nature Strip... then winning a G1 Galaxy a couple runs later.