3 minute read
Adam Blencowe takes a look at Ka Ying Rising and his place in the pantheon following Sunday's 20th consecutive success.
A souped-up surface at Sha Tin provided the platform for Ka Ying Rising to once again lower his own track record, ripping the Chairman's Sprint Prize to bits by stopping the clock inside 68 seconds for the 10th time.
The 'slowest' of those 10 times is 67.88 the 23rd fastest 1200m time at the course in the past 20 years according to the RAS database. I raise this point because 23 happens to be the number of races the account for the top 1%.
So, Ka Ying Rising isn't just the track record holder, he is responsible for 43.5% of the top 1%.
They include the four fastest and five of the six times lower than Sacred Kingdom's 2007 Sprint Trial which he completed in a then unreal 67.5. Sacred Kingdom had also smashed up the 1000m record with a 54.7 which had sparked a better-than-Silent Witness debate which probably still goes on (although maybe KYR has ruined that now) in the bars of Lan Kwai Fong.
The little sticking point is that the other inside 67.5 is Ka Ying Rising's solid stablemate Tomadachi Kokoroe who broke 68 twice in a stretch of three wins at the start of the season and serves to highlight the fact that modern horses are overrepresented at the top of the times.
Tomadachi Kokoroe ran to 116 in his fastest/latest win and has run to or near that rating in KYR's rearview mirror in five attempts since, but he merely underpins rather than challenges his famous barn mate and is one of many clues that, while the standard of the racing population in Hong Kong has been rising, the track is quicker now than it once was.
The case is there to be made that Sacred Kingdom's masterpiece was as great an outlier as KYR, and he is certainly a greater horse than Tomadachi Kokoroe, but whether I can make the case for Sacred Kingdom's peaks being near to KYR matters only in the context of the whole.
Side track: Models are a useful simplification. Think of a map (a model) of the Tokyo train system, which is a simplification of Tokyo itself, but it is correct and (can be) useful. It would cease to be useful if it didn't ignore some information about Tokyo as soon it would be as big as Tokyo – which is to say too big to comprehend without a map/model.
Punters and race fans see Sacred Kingdom and KYR not as a peak rating but as a whole array of performances and moments. Handicappers and analysts release the output of maps/models that are focused on just one part (the peak rating aka the Tokyo Underground) which says something like Sacred Kingdom and KYR are similarly matched but punters and race fans see that Sacred Kingdom's moments came along with failures and flaws that this modern machine simply doesn't have. The distance between two stations (SK and KYR) is far greater when viewed as a whole rather than on the map.
Relentless, brutal consistency is what punters see when they look at KYR. Since returning from Sydney (the ability to travel and perform across jurisdictions is another part of the whole that is valued by punters and not captured by maps) Ka Ying Rising has run to a RAS Rating of 130 or higher six times.
Very few run to such a level six times (KYR has now done it eight times) and even fewer six times consecutively.
We are now ready to talk about the mare.
Black Caviar ran to 130 or better 11 times. Twice she strung together four on the hop. Never did she get to six.
The great pub question that doesn't really matter but that it stirs up such debate that clearly on some level it does matter or is at least very interesting and fun:
Ka Ying Rising v Black Caviar – who wins?
Any analyst/handicapper/form student/fan with their head correctly attached knows that the answer to that question is: it depends.
Simply lining up peak ratings is unsatisfactory for reasons outlined above and so here we line up two (incredibly) convenient sets of ratings.
KYR has run eight times this season – his average rating is 130.875.
Black Caviar ran eight times in the 2010-11 season (the one that started with the ridiculous thing that happened on Cox Plate Day and Ben Melham smiling and waving as she kicked Star Witness, Ortensia and All Silent into next week, and then the Newmarket record before finishing with the whole Hay List affair. This could more simply be referred to as her pomp) – her average rating is 130.875.
If we draw from these ratings at random, one from each set, over a large number of occasions (100k) BC wins 54.4% of the time. This leaves KYR with 45.6%. It also leaves our answer to the question at - it depends.
It also depends on which set of ratings we pick to put in the machine - our chosen map – and so the debate goes on.
I recently watched Gout Gout set a new under-20 world record over 200m – lowering Usain Bolt's time at the same age if you don't mind - and noted that the commentators seemed unconcerned with the form of the runner up. Not one person queried what he had beaten!!
I won't do that for KYR or BC either, except to say that, perhaps, neither horse has really had their talents fully explored, for neither have raced one of their own athletic ability.
Black Caviar may never have raced one with her abilities, but she did absorb and run through pressure from high-class performers. Ka Ying Rising likely would as well, but it is not really a chance that has been afforded him.
Ka Ying Rising has spent his career on the front foot. The good horses that he has raced have been left to react to him rather than to take it to him – none good enough to do so.
Hay List is the most obvious example of a proactive (or worthy) rival for Black Caviar. He was not quite as gifted, but he was good enough to ask questions of the great mare.
Those questions were answered in a string of memorable performances which drew out the very best we saw of Black Caviar.
Unfortunately for Ka Ying Rising there are few on the sprint scene at the moment worthy of sharing the ring, let alone taking the fight to him, and so he will have to go looking for trouble in order to overcome it.
Fortunately, the stable are both willing and able and we get to sit back and watch.