Timeform highlight the best Flat race of 2023 based on the average master rating of the first three home.
WINNER: PRIX DE l'ARC DE TRIOMPHE (130)
As befits Europe’s richest race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, which has a first prize of more than €2.8m, was the best-quality contest of the year judged on the average of the Timeform master ratings of the first three finishers. It might not quite have been a vintage edition of the Arc, but it had a top-class and unbeaten winner in Ace Impact (rated 133), earlier successful in the Prix du Jockey Club. The season’s top three-year-old and best horse in Europe, Ace Impact produced at least as good a performance as the last couple of three-year-old colts to win the race, Workforce and Golden Horn.
A combination of good to firm ground – in contrast to the rain-softened going of recent years – and a pace that was by no means strong, enabled Ace Impact to make best use of his turn of foot in the straight which took him past most of the field on the way to beating four-year-old rivals Westover (131) and Onesto (128) by a length and three quarters and a short head.
Also making what turned out to be his final career start, Westover didn’t quite run up to his master rating but improved on his sixth place in the race the year before and took the runner-up spot in a Group 1 for the fourth time in 2023 during which he also won the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud. He also turned the tables on his King George conqueror Hukum who was another with leading claims on form but found conditions quicker than ideal, finishing ninth.
Third-placed Onesto was another to improve on his placing from 12 months earlier (only tenth in 2022), running a career-best, in fact, despite having to make a belated start to his campaign in August and coming off a below-par run in the Irish Champion Stakes in which he’d run so well the year before. While he couldn’t quicken to the same effect as Ace Impact from back in the field, he was staying on well at the finish and was likely to have got up for second in another stride or two.
There was speculation earlier in the year that Japanese star Equinox would be heading to Longchamp though he was never actually entered for the Arc. However, his form was well advertised in the race as, besides Westover, who’d been runner-up to him in Dubai (more of which below), the mare Through Seven Seas, who finished fourth for Japan in the Arc, had also finished second to Equinox in the Takarazuka Kinen at Hanshin on her previous start.
The world’s best horse Equinox (136) was another to end his racing career in triumph in the autumn in the Japan Cup but it was his victory at Tokyo the previous month in the Tenno Sho (Autumn) over a mile and a quarter, in which he set a new Japanese (and probable world) record for the distance, that was the better race in terms of the master ratings of the first three and underlines the strength of Japanese middle-distance form. Two and a half lengths back in second was Justin Palace (127), a high-class winner of the Spring version of the Tenno Sho over two miles at Kyoto (also third behind Equinox in the Takarazuka Kinen), while third was Prognosis (124), a dual Group 2 winner earlier in the year who also ran two good races behind Hong Kong’s top mile and a quarter performer Romantic Warrior at Sha Tin.
Equinox’s only appearance overseas came in the Dubai Sheema Classic at Meydan in March in which he made all the running for a most impressive three and a half length victory over Westover but was value for extra in another race in which he broke a track record. The Sheema Classic would have rated more highly if Mostahdaf, the future Prince of Wales’s Stakes and Juddmonte International winner and rated 129 from those subsequent wins over shorter, had finished third rather than fourth, but even so, the third horse Zagrey (122), although a 50/1 outsider on the day for France, more than confirmed that run back in Europe, finishing second to Westover in the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud and then winning Germany’s top race, the Grosser Preis von Baden.
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