$4.5 Million For a 2.5% share in Flightline. Give me strength!

​Hands up! I have never seen Flightline race, apart from the footage I.T.V. televised from his race before the Breeders Cup. Yes, though I watched, for the first ever time, some of the races from the Breeders Cup, mainly on Saturday, I did not last the course in order to see for myself the wonder horse Flightline. An early start the following day forbade me to stay up to watch the ‘Championship of the World’ to its, apparently, wondrous conclusion. And yes, being a cynic by nature the hullabaloo over Flightline did not float my boat.
Now, I am not refuting for a moment that Flightline is, or was, a horse of prodigious ability, the winning distances he achieved makes that unarguable to even someone of my cynical nature. But come on, the horse has a career record of 6 from 6, all on dirt and I suspect all over the same distance and racing only on left-turning racecourses. Would he have stayed sound beyond six-races? Could he have won races on turf or over longer or shorter distances?
Any journalist who believes Flightline is ‘the best ever’ or ‘one of the best ever’ is guilty of indulging himself or herself in an extravaganza of hyperbole. The word ‘potentially’ must be used when anyone gives their opinion on where Flightline stands in the pantheon of great horses, even U.S.-based great horses. Flightline, like so many European-based, racehorses, had the potential to set the benchmark for what a racehorse must achieve to top that mythical pantheon of ‘great racehorses’. Without taking anything away from Sea The Stars, a horse regularly listed as one of the ‘great horses’, his dominance lasted for no more than eight-months before he was whisked away to stud as, and I quote, ‘he had nothing else to prove’. Of course, he was retired at the end of his three-year-old season as his value as a stallion would have plummeted if he proved unable to give weight and a beating to the following year’s crop of three-year-olds.
This is also true about Flightline; retired before the financial bubble could burst. Of course, $50-million dollars in stud fees in his first season as a stallion would be difficult for any one of us to turn down. And, I am sure, those invested in Flightline are in it for the money, not the sport.
And this the crux of the matter as far as I am concerned. Horse racing is both a sport and an industry and like the chicken and the egg it is arguable comes first? Well, I’ll tell you the answer, the sport, as without the races that comprise the sport, Flightline would not be worth today what the bloodstock market suggests he is worth to his owners. Racing journalists, though perhaps not bloodstock journalists, should be appalled that a potentially great horse should be taken from the sport after only six-races. Six!
It is my opinion, contentious as it may be, that owners have a primary responsibility to the sport, especially in an age when the sport all around the world is facing hardships and criticism from anti-animal sports activists. Horses with the ability of Flightline draw crowds to racecourses; they put bums on seats to an extent that no human participant can normally do. The sport in the U.S. needed Flightline to stay in training for another year in the same way the sport in Britain needed the boost of Baaeed staying in training as a five-year-old. In retiring Flightline after only a handful of races, his owners are being both excessively greedy and selfish. They should not be applauded but held to account for acting solely for their own benefit. And $4.5 million for 2.5% share is ludicrous if you dwell on the possibility that the horse might be a dud at stud. It happens.
Is it any wonder that National Hunt in this country and Ireland has the more loyal and substantial following?