Fierceness, the new top odds favorite in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, is, like his fellow contender Sierra Leone, four years old. And, like Sierra Leone, he has run exactly thirteen races to date in his productive two-year-long career on the track. Sierra Leone has thirteen finishes in the money of his thirteen races; Fierceness has ten. Of those thirteen runs, Fierceness has seven wins to date; Sierra Leone has five. Each of them has raced in eight Grade 1s.
At first glance, we could fairly say that they are neck-and neck, but it’s axiomatic in horse racing that it’s about whom you run against. Sierra Leone ran second (to the slightly fluky Mystik Dan) in the 2024 Kentucky Derby; Fierceness infamously fell apart in that race and ran fifteenth. After that unmitigated disaster, Pletcher took the horse into a “layoff” work camp for a the summer and brought him masterfully back to form.
It was thought in the Pletcher barn to be a “mind” issue: In the pointed, fraught teeth of competition, the horse’s attention had a way of wandering, a natural-enough condition under which many four- and very many two-legged adolescent athletes also suffer. The point is, in the summer of 2024, Fierceness was an adolescent. With all that that implies.
That noted, Fierceness bounced out of it and handily re-proved his mettle as he returned to the track in August at Saratoga, immediately winning the Grade 2 Jim Dandy and the coveted Grade 1 Travers Stakes back-to-back. In the Jim Dandy, he bested Sierra Leone himself into a place showing, and in the Travers, Sierra Leone ran game third to Fierceness. Two months later, when the really big money and the really big boys met in the $7-million 2024 Breeders’ Cup Classic, it was the deep-closing Sierra Leone who handily took the honors. Fierceness held on with all his might to place.
Bottom line: If there can be said to be a winning phase, or a winning heart to Fierceness’ career thus far, by which is meant a series of races in which he was clearly comfortable with himself and his tasks, with nothing bothering him or blocking him from getting to the line, that would be in those two 2024 races in Saratoga, and in last year’s Classic. He was running free then, as his best self.
Since the fall of 2024, Fierceness has had exactly four races, two of which, the Grade 2 Alysheba and the Grade 1 Pacific Classic, he has won, besting Journalism in the latter of those. But in arguably the very biggest race of the four, he fell out of the money in the Grade 1 Whitney, which was, significantly, won handily by Sierra Leone. The 2025 Whitney wasn’t quite as disastrous as his Kentucky Derby showing, but it was close enough for discomfort. And there was something else about it: His run was a sort of collapse in the teeth of competition. It was his second go, folding like that. Put bluntly, fit as a fiddle he may be now, and he’s certainly training well at Del Mar, and yes, he clocked a nice win since the Whitney in the Pacific Classic.
But all is not in the number or recency of victories in racing, however decisive they may be; the success of this or that good runner in a race also depends upon how much he or she wants to win. In that 2024 Travers, the champion filly Thorpedo Anna ran a spectacular second to Fierceness and beat Sierra Leone just because she flat-out wanted it more. Since his place showing in the 2024 Breeders’ Classic, Fierceness’ speed numbers have fallen and he hasn’t managed to quite put forth that ineffable golden buzz about any race horse that’s rearing to win that things are all going right.
Fierceness’ question on Saturday is whether, in the doing, he can want it enough to make the win happen.