One of the first indications that truly discerns the elite from the non-elite is response to exercise. You hear it from the trainer usually when the horse has its first work over 5 furlongs (1000m) in around a minute. Top trainers say that this distance is, for whatever reason, the 'gold standard' in terms of sorting out what each horse is made of. It is not so much the time of the work over the distance itself, but more-so the response to this work with the elite horses post