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Originally Posted by Spalding No!
Actually, the only criteria is that a horse start at least once in North America. Turf horses have won it, injured 3yos that retired after the Belmont have won it, and dominant 2yos have won it.
As opposed to relying on a hypothetical head-to-head model, one could just as easily base it on the most impressive performance or "body of work".
Justify certainly fits the latter scheme, winning 6 races (from scratch) in the span of 110 days or so. In that time frame he won races from 7 furlongs to 12 furlongs. He was unbeaten. He won over 6 different distances. He won sprinting and routing. He won on fast tracks and off tracks. He won over 4 different racetracks in 4 states. He won the Triple Crown, only the 13th horse to do so in history. He's the only horse to have done so without starting as a 2yo.
3yos are rarely pitted against their elders until the fall, and Justify didn't make it to that part of the year due to injury. Rather than try and match him up to a 5yo Accelerate, an honest comparison to put Justify's accomplishments in perspective is to compare him to the 3yo Accelerate. Like Justify, Accelerate was also a late starting 3yo. He was a still a maiden after 3 starts during the 2016 Triple Crown.
Justify progressed at a phenomenal rate to make it to (and win) the Belmont Stakes. Accelerate's progression once he broke his maiden (July 2016) was impressive, too, as he finished out his 3yo campaign running 3rd in the BC Dirt Mile (a neck behind a likewise progressive Gun Runner), but it was not in the same stratosphere as Justify's...
As a 5yo, Accelerate won 4 races at Santa Anita, 1 at Del Mar, and won 1 of 2 starts on the road. The BC Classic this year was a modest bunch at best, with the 2nd and 3rd choices in the race being 3yos. Overall, the older horse division was underwhelming throughout the year.
The long and the short of it is that Justify one-upped all of US horse racing history by making his debut in February and carting off the Triple Crown barely 4 months later.
Accelerate--at best--one-upped Lava Man by taking the BC Classic at Churchill Downs after winning everything in California.
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You actually think that a hypothetical match-up between the top two candidates, who shared the same distance and surface preferences, in the year of their candidacy, is a bad idea? And that the good idea is to compare the two when they were the same age but in different years?
Um, no. I don't really care when Justify started his career except in the sense that it added to the brevity of it. That he started so late and did what he did in the space of a few months just showed there wasn't much out there challenging him. Or that perhaps he was being given the same stuff that made Arrogate so great for a similar period of time before he was likewise done.
