It’s axiomatic that Breeders’ Cup race week brings the best global equine athletes and their two-legged connections to the United States for what, over the last 41 years of it, has become the World Series of equine sports. The thirteen races — run this year at Del Mar over November 1-2, five races this Friday and nine on Saturday — will carry a bracing $30 million in purses, $7 million of which will be doled out to the winners in Saturday afternoon’s Classic. This may all seem SOP, standard operating procedure, but it remains extraordinary, in flat racing on dirt or turf, that the Cup’s quality of athlete and the array of events in which those athletic talents can be tested is unmatched, globally. No horse-racing country can stage the Breeders’ because nobody else save the USA has that vast Kentucky-bred depth of bench.

That depth of bench is the main reason that Thoroughbred horsemen from around the world are so keen to come Stateside to test their luck come November. The post position draw for this year’s Classic will take place at 4:15 (Pacific) at Del Mar on Monday, October 28, but the larger point here is that the white-hot international competitors have well and truly shown up in the Classic, in the form of Japan’s 3-year-old phenom Forever Young and Ireland’s City of Troy. It should be noted that the latter horse bears considerable sterling Kentucky roots in that his daddy is the big bay Triple Crown winner Justify.

Despite Classic field’s looming presence of Kentucky Derby placer Sierra Leone, the mile-and-a-quarter deep closer who would arguably have been better at a classic Belmont mile-and-a-half, Forever Young and City of Troy have, by hook and by crook, wormed their way into the racing-pundit hivemind as the two biggest threats to the favored but still-just-a-shade-doubtful Fierceness. There are several reasons for this that are important to factor in as we work through race week to our bets.

We’ll dive into how those two colts arrived in such high estimation below, but bottom line, Fierceness faces a thorny problem of his very own, namely, the long catalogue of his hill-and-dale performances over the course of 2024, with the absolute nadir being his 15th-place run in the Kentucky Derby. With his subsequent back-to-back wins in the Whitney and the Travers, respectively, he didn’t manage to fully displace the distrust engendered by that springtime trough in performances. Within that, are bound two distinct, though interrelated difficulties for the horse.

The first is mental, or more specifically, motivational: In competition, some afternoons are better than other afternoons for Fierceness. It can be argued that that’s a feature and a factor in his maturation — on the positive side of that issue, Pletcher, along with the entire country’s backstretch closely following Fierceness, has noted that the horse has put on weight and grown into himself more over the last months. He’s coming into the Breeders’ Classic with a newly-acquired a version of equanimity, and this is key, on the plateau of growth upon which he currently finds himself.

Which does not negate what we can describe as Fierceness’ second problem, namely, that of tactical ability and puissance, the lack of which was exquisitely revealed in the very teeth of his two-race bounce-back from the Derby loss, as he won the Travers at Saratoga on August 24. That difficulty came in the form of the fabulously game champion filly Thorpedo Anna, who, after beating literally every other top talent in her division, was handily moved over by Kenny McPeek to race the best boys that the Saratoga stewards could put together for their August finale.

Bluntly put, Thorpedo Anna brought a thrilling stretch run in the Travers and very nearly ran Fierceness down. As we know, Fierceness hung on by his toenails but the man was obviously fading in the moment, shortly before the line. In other words, Fierceness showed his tactical and physical limits precisely at, or just a furlong before, a mile-and-a-quarter.

Thorpedo Anna wasn’t fading in that last furlong; she was in the business of overtaking him. The point is double-edged: However much Fierceness has settled and/or has grown, distance remains a dangerous or at least an iffy factor for him. As a front runner, and a known slow-to-mature one, Fierceness labors constantly under the thunderhead of spending too much of himself too early. Had he not been able to overcome the immense buildup of lactic acid in him to hold off Thorpedo Anna, he would have lost the Travers.

Fierceness’ connections, specifically his owner Mike Repole, knew how close the Travers victory had been. Repole was reported as having jovially requested Thorpedo Anna’s trainer McPeek to keep his filly in races with other fillies, which was the sort of remark made when a win is a bit too narrow for the owner’s comfort.

Which brings us to Forever Young and City of Troy, who represent challenges of similar, if not greater, order for Fierceness. Like Thorpedo Anna, both these international colts have, at three, established enviable records of steady wins, which is pretty much the minimum for entry into the Classic, but each of them is, also, more than their past performances. They get away dependably well, they work well, they are battle-tested on the track, and both of them have built stellar reputations.

Trained by Aidan O’Brien, City of Troy has been raking in the plaudits as Europe’s top three-year-old, and in the care of the legendary Irish trainer has won the Juddmonte International at York in August and in June won the renowned Epsom Derby. Here is the key to the horse and his acclaim: The Juddmonte is run at a mile-and-five-sixteenths, and the Epsom Derby is effectively the Belmont Stakes of English racing, at a mile-and-a-half. Between those two races, at Sandown on July 6, he won the mile-and-a-quarter Coral Eclipse, also a Grade 1 stakes. Put another way, two of his last three commanding wins have been at distances greater than that of the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Now, here’s his question: In City of Troy’s 7-race career, he has won six times. But he has only, ever, raced in England on turf. Another way to say that would be to say that, although City of Troy is a Kentucky-bred son of a Triple Crown winner and by virtue of pedigree should like dirt — and of course he has been training on the surface as plans to bring him to the Classic have solidified — we don’t actually know what he’s going to think about having dirt under him in the blaze of Saturday afternoon’s competition.