The Best Around? It's Chrome

With so many top horses racing Saturday at Saratoga and Del Mar it was anybody's guess who would steal the day. It's been that kind of year, one where there are so many superstar horses competing across the country that we thought one of six or seven could wind up being Horse of the Year, wind up being the horse embellished in our memories more so than any other as we look back with fond recollections on the glorious year that 2016 has already been.

Would it be Songbird (Medaglia d'Oro)? For a handful of hours it looked like she might just be the one who owned Aug. 20, 2016. Still undefeated and unchallenged throughout her career, Songbird did what she always does, she dominated the competition in the GI Alabama at Saratoga. She is a filly for the ages and deserves to be in the conversation when it comes to the best 3-year-old fillies of all time.

But about three hours after she put on a show in the Alabama, a horse went out and did something so special that it made Songbird's victory seem like just a normal horse race.

The GI Pacific Classic was not supposed to be easy for California Chrome (Lucky Pulpit). The opposition included last year's winner in the superstar mare Beholder (Henny Hughes) and a serious race horse in Dortmund (Big Brown). In Hoppertunity (Any Given Saturday) and Imperative (Bernardini) there were still two more millionaires in the race. The wise guys were jumping off the Chrome bandwagon, many of them predicting that this would be the occasion where we would get his comeuppance.

Instead, we saw what was arguably the best performance ever by a great race horse. Songbird, Beholder, Tepin (Bernstein), Frosted (Tapit), Flintshire (Dansili {GB}), Exaggerator (Curlin), they are all wonderful horses, some of the best we've seen in a long time. But none of them belong in the same sentence as California Chrome.

Considering all that he had already done in his career, it's hard to imagine that Chrome could take things to another level. But that's exactly what he did in the Pacific Classic. Lining up against one of the best fields ever assembled for the $1-million race, he didn't just win, he embarrassed a couple of fabulous race horses in Beholder and Dortmund.

Breaking from the rail, jockey Victor Espinoza understood that he had to take things into his own hands in order to avoid any chance of getting into trouble. So he left the gate in a hurry and immediately put daylight between him and his closest pursuer.

You sometimes see this, where a horse is so superior to his or her rivals that he just runs them into the ground. That's exactly what Chrome did in the Pacific Classic. From start to finish, he was simply faster, simply superior than his rivals. He outran them every step of the way and really, really good horses like Beholder and Dortmund never had a prayer of catching him. He's won a GI Kentucky Derby, a GI Preakness and a GI Dubai World Cup, but this was the most impressive performance of his career. What a horse.

Probably, Songbird, a 3-year-old filly, couldn't lay a glove on him. But wouldn't it be fun to find out? She has been handled with kid gloves, has never faced males and, through no fault of her own, missed the GI Kentucky Oaks because of an illness. Her connections don't adhere to the same philosophy that the Rachel Alexandra (Medaglia d'Oro) team had, which was to take on all comers, no matter their age and sex. Because of that, because of her wins over males in the GI Preakness, GI Haskell and GI Woodward she will go down in history as arguably the greatest 3-year-old filly ever. Songbird's connections are taking a far more conservative route, which will likely cost their horse any chance of winning the Horse of the Year title.

Then again, does it really matter? She couldn't beat California Chrome. Beholder couldn't do it Saturday, neither could Dortmund. Will Frosted? That's unlikely. It looks like nobody can beat this horse. On Saturday in the Pacific Classic at Del Mar, he encountered the greatest challenge of his career and he looked his rivals in the eye and laughed at them. He toyed with them.

What a horse, indeed.