Training legend Lee Freedman doesn't think so.

And neither does top jockey Glen Boss, who is due to ride reigning Cox Plate favourite Kermadec in both Saturday's Caulfield Stakes and the big race itself a fortnight later.

And Boss is determined to find out if the Chris Waller-trained four-year-old will run out the trip before he tackles the Valley assignment by making sure he has a searching hit-out – a "gutbuster" as Boss put it – over the Cox Plate distance in the Group One Caulfield Stakes.

Speaking at a TAB function on Tuesday, Boss said he thought Kermadec was a superior galloper to his last Cox Plate winning mount, the New Zealander Ocean Park. But he would need to be, Boss said, because the quality of this year's race was higher than when Ocean Park beat All Too Hard and Pierro in 2012.

Freedman sounded a note of caution about the favourite, whose four race wins have come over distances up to 1600 metres – including this year's Doncaster Handicap, when he carried the relative featherweight of 51 kilos.

"If he doesn't win at 2000 metres before the Cox Plate he can't win the Cox Plate," he said.

And Freedman should know, having won the Plate twice, with Makybe Diva and Super Impose. That pair had both proved themselves over far longer distances before their Valley successes, the Diva having won two of her three Melbourne Cups before her triumph in 2005, Super Impose having run second in the 3200 metre Cup in 1990, two years before his Cox Plate victory.

Boss said that for some reason horses find the jump from 1600 metres to 2000 metres harder than the increase in distance from 2000 to 2400 metres and that to win this year, with some high quality opposition and a strong European challenge, Kermadec would have to stay every metre of the Plate trip.

"This year's Cox Plate, there will be nowhere to hide," Boss said. "There will be speed on at the start, in the middle and at the end."

He said the Caulfield Stakes, over 2000 metres, would be the ideal race in which to find out if Kermadec gets the trip.

In opposition will be proven tough nuts with form over the trip, horses like Caulfield Cup winner and Cox Plate runner-up Fawkner, another Cox Plate placegetter in Happy Trails, dual Derby winner Mongolian Khan and Group One winners Contributor and Pornichet.

"I am going to make sure he is going to have a gutbuster. I am going to make sure he is going to have a hard race. I don't just want to be winning and pulling up and doing  this fancy shit, he's going to have a hard race," said Boss.

The jockey usually wears his heart on his sleeve and is not one to die wondering, so while his comments might sound cavalier he certainly rates the son of Teofilio highly.

Boss described Kermadec as a "pretty cruisy horse" and said in his last work he ambled up to opponents in a track gallop with the ease that Black Caviar might have.

Boss has won the Plate three times in the past 10 years – aboard Makybe Diva, Ocean Park and on the champion So You Think when the star galloper was a three-year-old – so he, perhaps more than any current rider, knows what is needed to win the weight-for-age championship event.

"Its going to be one of the best races ever," Boss said with his trademark enthusiasm.