I tend to view this differently to everyone else I think, as I'll legislate for the fact that he was a novice, and therefore on a development curve, with a reasonable anticipation of improvement.
The Sun Alliance Chase is the other race at Cheltenham that tends to be habitually run on the slow side (not anywhere near as bad as the Stayers Hurdle though) but still detectable. With this in mind I prefer to benchmark his figure against those that I awarded to previous winners in order to get a handle on where he sits historically against horses whose form is now known, and a matter for the history books.
Until last year, the biggest single level of superiority I had for any grade 1 Cheltenham winner was Moscow Flyer, who I had some 8L's clear of his nearest pursuer in the Arkle. In this case, it proved to be useful benchmark as the horse would go onto establish himself as "a great". However, by virtue of running a faster time than standard on offically soft ground, MWDS closed this gap. The horse that now holds this questionable accolade is Denman, who in wining the SAC the next day, ran 5.75L's faster than his nearest historical pursuer (Florida Pearl). The only other horse who is significantly superior to any winner of the last 12 years is Detroit City in the Triumph.
I'm prepared to use this high water mark benchmarked against other historical performances, and the fact that he has the highest level of superiority over all other winners of any grade 1 race, as evidence of his ability?.
Strictly speaking I think he has a higher TS than Kauto did as a novice too?
Also if I asked you to guess who the respective top rated are, you'd probably get all 9 of them, or certainly 8, so there's an element of substance behind the rating as there's few surprises (if any) which might otherwise point towards a flawed methodology
