I don’t think the racehorse Flightline is getting much coverage - but he should. Although he never raced in any of the Triple Crown races and doesn’t race very often (only five races since debuting in April of 2021), those races are spectacular. His smallest winning margin was “only” six lengths in the top-class Metropolitan Handicap, and that was because he encountered a troubled trip that day.
Every other race features a win by double-digit lengths, topped off by his 19 1/4 length win in the Pacific Classic last week.
Those leads in individual races are certainly impressive, but results in racing sports can also be compared between events. How do his times compare to other great horses of the past?
Although times are not really comparable between racetracks (or even across different days at the same racetrack), Flightline’s Pacific Classic time was 1 minute 59.28 seconds, just .17 seconds (about one length) slower than the stakes and track record of 1:59.11 set in 2003 - and Flightline was not asked to run for most of the length of the stretch.
Speed figures are designed to adjust for the differences between tracks and conditions; on those Flightline ran a Beyer speed figure of 126, the second highest ever at the distance (a horse named Ghostzapper ran a 128 in the 2004 Breeders’ Cup Classic). He was even more impressive on the Thorograph performances figures, where lower numbers are better. On those, he ran a negative 8 1/2, which is the best figure ever, topping the previous high of negative 8. And that’s only based on the figure maker basing Flightline’s number on the beaten horses all running slower than normal; it’s possible Flightline ran a ludicrously fast negative 11.
I should add that the second place finisher in the Pacific Classic, the correctly-misspelled Country Grammer, won the $12 million Dubai World Cup earlier this year, at the 1 1/4 mile distance of the Pacific Classic. Yet Flightline trounced him.