Racing: Mujahid has a chance in a millenium

THE LONGEST wait in racing is for the next stellar beast to come along, the next Brigadier Gerard, Mill Reef or Nijinsky, horses which thrilled us almost 30 years ago. The wait, it seems, will go on for another year at least.

According to the official assessment of last year's two-year-olds there is little likelihood of a champion emerging before the millenium. At the International Classifications in London yesterday it was revealed that the leading juvenile bloodstock of 1998 was the best matched for many a year. The peleton is huge and no-one has yet broken away.

The ratings leader was the Dewhurst Stakes winner, Mujahid. But many of the Newmarket victims are at his shoulder, within Brutus distance. "I would be very surprised if there was a horse in this generation that proved massively superior," Matthew Tester, the British Horseracing Board's two-year-old handicapper, said. "We haven't got an outstanding horse.

"The Dewhurst didn't seem to settle the argument and even the horses we know, like Enrique and Stravinsky, look as though they have got a lot more to offer. When they were pitched into the Dewhurst, Enrique, in particular, had never had to fight or get in a battle.

"They can't all win the 2,000 Guineas, but I believe that if you look at the first four home in the Dewhurst it's possible they will all be rated higher next year. They have all got more to come. They could all be top class, if not all top class on the same day.

"We all look for the next superhorse and that's why the Dewhurst was so hyped up because you could make a case out for greatness for quite a few of them. But the answer is, at this stage, that none of them is the next superhorse."

Another set of figures hardly enhances Mujahid's prospects of winning the 2,000 Guineas. Of the last 17 juveniles to top the classifications, nine failed to win a Group One race at three. As the stock market investment caveat suggests, past performance is not necessarily a guide to the future.

There is little succour either for Mujahid in the ante-post market. While the men who conduct the frigid, esoteric compilation of ratings may champion him, just about everyone else was more touched last year by Godolphin's Aljabr. That includes another bunch of cold hearts, the bookmakers, who have the Prix de la Salamandre winner as their winter favourite.

It will delight the layers that there is no horse with wings. Nothing kills betting like a long-range odds-on shot. "It's one of the most open winters we have seen for a long time," Tester added. "You can go down the list and consider eight horses who could win a Guineas. It's absolutely up for grabs."

Overall, it appears it was hardly a season to stimulate. Just about all the classifications' category leaders compared badly with their predecessors, and the Classic-winning quintet of King Of Kings, Cape Verdi, High-Rise, Shahtoush and Nedawi are all considered below average.

Apparently the best British horse to race last year was Intikhab, who never contested a Group One race and did not appear after his Queen Anne Stakes success at Royal Ascot because of splint problems.

There was no outstanding horse among the three-year-olds, and the crop leader, David Loder's Queen Elizabeth II winner Desert Prince, is hardly burned lastingly in the common mind. Sagamix was well below the form which is usually required to win a Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe and if they ran the race again over the pages of the classifications dossier High-Rise would come out on top.

Swain retires as perhaps the most versatile and consistent quality animal of the era. He has featured in four classifications rated at 122 or over and raced from 10 to 14 furlongs on dirt and turf. But the best older horse, and the best in the world, is reckoned to be another preparing for a breeding career in Kentucky, Skip Away.

The United States again provides a battery of horses both seasoned and brilliant, animals which are still around because of the beneficial prize- money across the Atlantic. And America is having a great impact in more ways than one. The classifications panel assessed about 900 horses from 14 nations during their nine-day sitting, and it seems to have told on some of them. Sheikh Mohammed will certainly be surprised to read in the report that Godolphin's 1,000 Guineas winner Cape Verdi was trained by Peter Chapple-Hyam.

Perhaps this was the effect of desert sun at the conference's base in Tucson, Arizona. Perhaps it was a consequence of a trip to the High Chaparral and slugs of redeye with big John Cannon, Buck, Manolito and the boys.