Jay August, one of the top intellectuals in SA racing, posted this about the three-year-old crop.
My three-year-old male ratings subsequent to the first Grade 1 on Saturday (yesterday). This rating model is calibrated to the APC rating model and a racetrack performance in SAF is therefore largely confined to a max rating of 120-121. See below for further explanation.
An average Cape Guineas winner will rate at ~112 and that is almost where Cousin Casey has rated after the 2022 Guineas in finishing second. Placing that into context propels Charles Dickens to 119, but he gets an extra 1 point from me for the ease with which he won. Jet Dark is currently rated at 119.
No three-year-old has rated this highly this early in the season while I have been compiling my ratings in real-time. The highest rating for a 3yo performance in the first 5 months of the season prior to this was the 114 given to Soqrat for his 2018 Guineas win.
Why are rating performances in SAF largely contained to an upper ceiling of 120-121. I refer here to a comment made by Tony Morris in the 1999 book Champions which rated the best worldwide racecourse performances over the prior century. He stated that “……Sea Cottage (South Africa) were big fish in small ponds. They may have been great champions, but they never met the international competition that may have enabled them to prove it, therefore we cannot give them the credit for it. There is a ceiling – in rating terms about 132lbs (he used the Timeform scale which is appreciably higher than the APC scale) – above which such champions cannot rise, no matter how dominant they may be.”
This does not however imply that a SAF horse cannot attain a higher rating on SA soil, but that performance has to be something exceptional, rarely seen, and rationally quantifiable in the eyes of international observers. Horse Chestnut’s 1999 Met win would qualify as such a performance, although back then the SAF ratings internationally were still in their infancy and the ratings we now take as normal for SA horses were assessed 3-6 points lower. HC likely achieved a 123+ using today’s scale in the 99 Met.
Can Charles Dickens exceed the 120 ceiling? It is quite possible but he would need to beat Jet Dark by a couple of lengths with that horse beating his usual rivals by the margin of his currently assumed superiority – about 0.5 lengths superior to Kommetdieding at the latter’s best.
Jay’s three-year-old rating are shown below:
