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I know that St. Trinians was good enough to defeat Life Is Sweet fairly convincingly, the same Life Is Sweet that dismantled the Ladies' Classic field last fall but couldn't lay a glove on Zenyatta whenever she tried. And Switch was good enough to get a win over Blind Luck, in addition to running second in a BC race on the weekend.
No horse can win 19 in a row, or 16 in a row, etc., without facing some modest competition along the way, that's for sure. But no mare can win 14 consecutive Gr 1 races, including the Distaff one year and the Classic the next year, and then almost win the Classic again in the following year unless she's pretty damn far up the list of female racehorses. We're talking about a 6YO mare in November; how many horses are still at that level of form at the end of their 6YO campaign? Maybe you have the stats on the % of Gr 1 older horse dirt races that have been won by 6YO's. I'm guessing it's rather miniscule. I think that the 4YO or 5YO Zenyatta probably would've won on Saturday.
The argument was never totally about Zenyatta for me, really. In a micro sense she was the subject but in a macro view it was more about people being so reliant on speed figures-- especially, the Beyer figures, since they're the most available and well-known numbers-- to pass judgments. She just happened to be the specific case where many of us felt that the speed figures and margins of victory weren't telling the whole story. I think we've been proved correct to at least some extent.
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