By 
As with the baseball stars of that era – Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth – the names of the greatest horses of the roaring decade are still with us, decades after most who witnessed their glory have died. Who hasn’t heard of Man O’War? In an iconic decade, great racehorses became icons, and icons continue to be.
Exterminator
The 1922 Horse of the Year was originally intended as a dam training partner for rival Sun Briar. Willis Sharpe Kilmer, who bought the Exterminator before his three-year-old season, thought he had been duped when his trainer Henry McDaniel paid far more than authorized for the chestnut gelding. But there was a problem: Exterminator kept matching Sun Briar, a champion junior horse, speed for speed in training.
The horse also seemed to have an instinctive understanding of race strategy: it would accelerate when necessary and stop when McDaniel told it to. So when Sun Briar developed ringbone, McDaniel encouraged Kilmer to enter his understudy in the next Kentucky Derby. At first, Kilmer rejected the plan, until the president of Churchill Downs, who had seen Exterminator training, intervened.
Suddenly the inexperienced and raceless Exterminator found himself facing a particularly muddy Derby morning. But his furious final kick carried him from the back of the field, where he had waited comfortably throughout the race, biding his time, to the source, where he won by a length.
He continued to mature, racing to the unusual age of nine and beating horses that had, in previous years, outperformed him. In total, he earned 33 stakes victories, a record unbroken by any North American thoroughbred.
mad hatter and mad game
Though they tend to be dwarfed by the more famous half-brother Man O’War, these Thoroughbred brothers, both sired by Man O’War’s sire Fair Play and the mare Mad Cap, took top racing honors. important in the early 1920s.
During his two-year-old season, older brother the Mad Hatter took on the Bellerose Stakes, while building a reputation as a temperamental, occasionally irritable horse, best understood by jockey Earl Sande. After his junior season’s loss to Sir Barton in the Maryland Handicap race, these two horses struck up a rivalry, adding sweetness to Mad Hatter’s Pimlico’s victory over Sir Barton. But it was as a mature racing thoroughbred that the Mad Hatter really shined, winning the Jockey Club Gold Cup and going on to win stakes races throughout the twenties.
Mad Play, the younger of the two brothers (born 1921), also benefited from the expert guidance of the great Earl Sande. The three-year-old season saw impressive third-place finishes in the Preakness Stakes, but at Belmont (the final event of the Triple Crown) he earned lasting fame, beating his closest rival by one and a half lengths.
Both horses were found, after retirement, to be barren, ending the possibility of a mad dynasty.
Man O’War
Was Man O’War (1917-1947), as many have argued, the greatest Thoroughbred racehorse of all time? It depends on the criteria you use. Consistency? (Man O’War won 9 of 10 races in his two-year-old season. His only loss came in the Sanford Memorial Stakes, where his jockey failed to turn him around at the start of this pre-gates-era race , and in which he was boxed in at least three times and still placed second.
The following year he won every race he entered, with a 20-1 record.) Breakneck speed? (He set several world and US records.) Competitive will? (Look at that 20-1 record again.) Overall effect on the sport? (Man O’War sired 64 stakes winners, despite complaints from horse fanciers that he was paired with inferior mares. He was also the grandfather of Seabiscuit.)
No matter how you judge it, it’s hard to argue too much with Blood Horse magazine’s statement, in its list of the 100 Greatest American Thoroughbred Champions of the 20th Century, that Man O’War belonged to the top of the list. that list.