Flatter: Flightline evokes comparison, but what's legit?

Lexington, Ky.

The comparisons were flying around Saturday just as fast as Flightline was taking off around the far turn not long before it got dark at Keeneland.

Not to worry, because the best active racehorse in the world created his own daylight.

Flightline’s 8 1/4-length triumph in the Breeders’ Cup Classic was the inspiration. Just the way he chewed up and spat out frontrunner Life Is Good and a field full of nothing but Grade 1 winners. Just like his 19 1/4-length runaway in the Pacific Classic (G1) on Labor Day weekend slackened jaws. And, of course, there were his four victories before that.

“I’ll take Flightline Superlatives for $1,600, Ken.” Talk about your daily double.

Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith, 57, rode Taiba to a distant third behind Flightline on Saturday. He also rode Justify to the 2018 Triple Crown. He dared to step on that third rail of racing arguments by uttering the “S” word.

“He’s up there with old Secretariat,” Smith said.

Such statements have been sacrilege in the 49 years since Big Red threw down that tremendous-machine, 2:24.0 Belmont Stakes. They still are the stuff of tongue sores demanded by cynics who are only happy to use tamping tools to do their tut-tutting.

Take another Hall of Famer, Bill Mott, 69, whose Olympiad finished a distant second Saturday. Mott also led Cigar to a touchstone winning streak of 16 races in the mid ’90s.

“He’s a star,” Mott said about Flightline. Then he paused and said, “I think greatness is only done through the test of time.”

Maybe this discussion needs to take a hard turn away from us horsey folks. We have been banging on with this debate since Dec. 26, when Flightline turned his hope and promise into an 11 1/2-length runaway in the Malibu (G1) at Santa Anita.

That would be near Los Angeles, where there is a baseball club called the Dodgers. It is the team that brought notice to Sandy Koufax in the ’60s. Koufax, you know, was the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time.

Then along came Clayton Kershaw. Each has won three Cy Young Awards. Kershaw just passed Koufax this year by making his ninth All-Star Game. Koufax was only 30 when he retired after just 12 seasons. Kershaw is 34 and still going.

So Kershaw must be better, because he has lasted longer. But wait. Koufax pitched in an era of four-man starting rotations and complete games. Kershaw has dominated at a time when five-man rotations are giving way to bullpen games.

So is it Koufax, who had 137 complete games, or Kershaw, who has 25, the most pristine of portsiders? Carry that analogy to Thoroughbreds, who more and more are being raced to breed rather than bred to race.

Secretariat finished 21 races and won 16, including a Triple Crown that ended a quarter-century drought. Even then his was considered a career cut short by a syndication deal worth more than $6 million to investors who could not wait to make him a stallion.

Flightline has raced six times, and he might be done, what with Lane’s End ready to turn him into a producer of horses and a cow of cash.

Kosta Hronis, the lead owner of Flightline, has deftly fended off questions about whether his champion is done racing. But being a Dodgers fan, Hronis was only happy to consider the baseball question about his 4-year-old star. Is Flightline more Kershaw than Koufax?

“I love baseball,” Hronis said. “He’s Cal Ripken.”

Wait a second. A horse with only six races to his name gets a comparison to a baseball player who did not miss a game in 16 years?

“He shows up every day, and you can count on him,” Hronis said, thinking as much about training as he was about racing. “So we’re going with Ripken. Because he’s the iron horse.”

OK, so Hronis might have gotten carried away with his enthusiasm in the heat of the moment, one that actually had John Sadler in tears as he considered what he had just witnessed with the best horse of his training life.

Writing for the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press-Democrat in 2015, sports writer Bob Padecky eloquently said, “History is best written after the passage of time, smoothing out the raw edges of hyperactive impulse.”

Another sports writer, Bob Ehalt of BloodHorse, unearthed a fact that would apply here. He asked Ed Bowen of the National Racing Museum and Hall of Fame who was the last horse to be inducted with fewer than 10 starts? It was Artful in 1902.

Maybe we are back to the future with Flightline, who is a lead-pipe cinch for the Hall of Fame, right? Even with as few as six races to his name. Times change.

It used to be that 300 wins were nearly a must for baseball pitchers to be considered all-timers. If that still were true, no 21st-century pitchers would make it into the Hall of Fame.

So what is the moral to this wended story? It is that we ought to enjoy Flightline for what he is – or was – in the moment. Animals do this right. They enjoy their positive experiences without comparing them with other ones. At least that is what our pets would lead us to believe.

But we are all too human, and we must argue and debate. We bicker over everything from elections like the one Tuesday to whether we should keep turning our clocks back and forth twice a year, as we will by the time we wake up Sunday.

As Saturday ended on Eastern Daylight Time at Keeneland, and as writers were banging away on their laptops, someone noticed another magnificent sunset out the press-box window.

Even that triggered debate.

“That’s nothing,” someone said. “Wait ’til you get in your 60s.”

Yeah. But that sunset was no Flightline.