Baseball pundits are fond of the idea of the 'AAAA' ball player: too good for minor league, 'AAA' ball, but not good enough for the major leagues. The concept actually probably makes a good more sense in racing, where everything revolves around winning or losing. Not to speak for all sabermetricians (my following of baseball is a bit lax for me to qualify as one, actually), but we are skeptical that someone can be very good on one level, and then downright poor on the next.
A ballplayer figures to fall off 30 points in batting average from AAA to the major leagues, say. Those 30 points can't logically be enough to make him the best player in AAA, on the one hand, and not good enough for a starting job in the majors on the other. But in racing, meeting competition four lengths tougher can logically be the difference between winning and losing, which makes all teh difference.
I suspect a simple difference in competition isn't simply what explained Voodoo, a fine Jim Jerkens gelding who earned almost $700,000 from 2000-2006, and once ran 2nd in the Carter as well as the Vosburgh. He also won the 2003 Sport Page, his only graded victory. But whatever the reasons, whether they included luck, a psychological reaction to the difference in competition, or simple limits on how fast he could run, the difference in Voodoo's success in allowance and stakes competition before his years as an old horse was striking.
When he won an August allowance at Saratoga as a 5-year-old, he upped his career record against New York allowance competition (and all allowance competition) to five wins in five starts. At the same time, he was winless in stakes, with 13 tries at those races. This isn't 2 for 13 in one arena, and 3 for 5 in another; this is 0 for 13, and 5 for 5. For good measure, Voodoo also took just one try to break his maiden.
To bolster the idea that the level of competition really was the driving force behind his record, the discrepancy does not mainly represent allowances at one point in time, and stakes at another. That is what is so rare and distinctive about Voodoo's record. After breaking his maiden, he had a stakes loss, then an allowance win; then three stakes losses, and an allowance win; then five stakes losses, and an allowance win; then two runs of consecutive stakes losses, followed by allowance wins.
I don't think it would be fair to say that the public didn't pick up on the trend, but it wasn't as if Voodoo was odds on in all of his allowance tries, either. He was favored in four of them, but only odds on once. The time he wasn't favored, he was 8-1, but came out on top of odds-on Aldebaran, Smooth Jazz, and Windsor Castle. Certainly from a distance, it's hard to see this victory, against such a group of graded stakes winners, as supporting the general trend, whatever the actual stakes (or lack thereof) of the race. There was at least some luck in the dichotomy, and fans were right not to back Voodoo blindly in his allowance tries, and would have been right (if poorer) not to categorically dismiss him as a win possibility in stakes.
Two races after his fifth allowance victory, Voodoo got off the stakes schneid, winning the Sport Page. The allowance streak also ended in his next try at one, although in fact he never won another race of any prestige, going 0 for 18 over his final 33 months or so of racing after the '03 Sport Page. He was 2nd five times in this stretch, including in the '04 Vosburgh, and including in two allowance races, from three tries at the class.
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