We are obviously going to agree to disagree on much here. Visually impressive is only meaningful if the horses the winner was visually impressive over weren't tomato cans.

Intense Holiday had to run down a lone pace setter who was busy running a 1.5 (pulled from the ROTW archives) in the Risen Star. Constitution and Wicked Strong had to perform similar feats in their last races where the pace was more strongly contested, but the pace setters were running very good figs even in defeat.

CC has never had to do anything even remotely that difficult in his California races. He got to sit just off tomato can pace setters and draw off on a track that is extremely biased to horses on/near the lead most days.

Hoppertunity may still end up being a good horse, as I'm sure moving back to Cali on 3 weeks rest and changing from a muddy OAK surface to the SA drag strip (and coming off a new top) meant he was not on his A game that day. But him aside, Im not seeing anything at all CC has faced that would even finish in the money east of the Mississippi in a G1 route race against some of these NY/FL/LA horses. CC might be able to beat GAR (I'm not convinced of that at 10F, but whatever), but GAR would win by open lengths against anything CC has beaten this year.