Arrogate named World's Best Racehorse

LONDON – Bob Baffert sometimes called Arrogate “The Blue Locomotive,” a steel gray colt with a relentless stride who, once he gained momentum, was nearly impossible to stop. The Arrogate train went off the tracks midway through 2017, but a quiet end to Arrogate’s journey doesn’t erase the memorable stops along the way, and Arrogate’s superiority was rewarded again Tuesday when he was named the Longines World’s Best Racehorse for 2017 by the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities at an awards luncheon at Claridge’s Hotel.

Baffert attended to accept the award. That’s nothing new. Arrogate became the second horse after Frankel in 2011 and 2012 to win the World’s Best Racehorse award twice, and Baffert also was here in 2015 when American Pharoah was named World’s Best Racehorse.

“I get another watch,” Baffert said, joined on stage by Teddy Grimthorpe, racing manager for Khalid Abdullah’s Juddmonte Farms, which campaigned Arrogate and now stands him at stud.

Also at the ceremony, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, won by the 3-year-old filly Enable, was named the Longines World’s Best Horserace of 2017. That award is based on the ratings in the top four finishers of Group 1 and Grade 1 races across the world. Enable did not crack the very top of the 2017 ratings because she received a 10-pound sex and age allowance from older males.

Arrogate in 2017 and 2016 as well as American Pharoah the year before were rated 134 by a panel of international handicappers working under the auspices of the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities. The ratings are based on a single performance, in this case Arrogate’s Dubai World Cup, where he blew the break, trailed the field into the first turn, then one by one picked off all of his rivals, the last of them Gun Runner, who is sure to be named Horse of the Year in North America at the Eclipse Awards this week.

“That day in Dubai, if you watched all our faces, you’d have seen the whole gamut of emotions in a about a minute and a half,” Grimthorpe said.

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While the ratings are tied to a single race, taking into account time, racing surface, level of competition, and luck in running, the handicapping committee also must decide on a rating they believe represents repeatable performance.

“This is not a handicap – this is a highest sustainable performance,” said Phil Smith, co-chair of the Longines World’s Best Racehorse Ranking Committee. “And Arrogate’s performances at Gulfstream and Dubai were sustainable.”

With Arrogate, the panel looked back at the 2016 Travers, the 2016 Breeders’ Cup, and Arrogate’s previous 2017 start, a dominant win in the Pegasus World Cup Invitational (for which Arrogate was rated 131) to arrive at their rating.

“It’s a subjective exercise, but when a subjective exercise is done by a group of handicappers from 16 different countries, it’s done very professionally,” said Louis Romanet, chairman of the IFHA.

Winx, the Australian wonder-mare who has won 22 races in a row and had a perfect 9-for-9 2017, including seven Group 1 wins, was the IFHA’s second-highest-rated horse last year at 132. Winx, who is gearing up for her 2018 bow, was the highest-rated turf horse and highest-rated female of 2017, but many among her legions of fans surely believe she, not Arrogate, should have been crowned World’s Best Racehorse. Complicating the situation is the fact Winx never has raced outside Australia, and it is easier for the IFHA panel to make assessments when a horse’s form spreads across racing jurisdictions.

“What she would have done outside Australia, nobody can know,” Romanet said.

Winx is being considered for European trip this year, chiefly a start at Royal Ascot in the Queen Anne Stakes, but no decision has been made on the shape of her 2018 campaign, part-owner Peter Tighe said while accepting the second-place award Tuesday. Tighe said plans could be announced next month. Winx is tentatively scheduled to make her first start of the year in the Apollo Stakes on Feb. 17.

Two horses, Gun Runner and Cracksman, were third-highest rated by the IFHA at 130. Gun Runner earned a 130 rating in four different starts last year, while Cracksman got up to his mark in his Champion Stakes win to cap his 3-year-old campaign.

For Arrogate, there was no real cap to the campaign, just a relatively sad end to his career: A bad loss in the San Diego Handicap, a better second in the Pacific Classic, and a fifth-place finish in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Racing, like most of life, has a recency bias, and in an ideal world a horse’s campaign is crescendo, not diminuendo.

“I think it probably may have caught up with him after Dubai,” Baffert said. “When I brought him back, it gutted him pretty good. He always to me looked good in the mornings, but he just didn’t want to perform. After [the San Diego] we were thinking of retiring the horse because that was such an awful performance. Before, it was like, ‘Who’s gonna beat this horse?’ It really hurt to see him not come close to his best again - that was the thing about it that was so disappointing. To this day when I see friends they still ask, ‘What the hell happened?’ It was nothing obvious with him. He just didn’t want to run.”

That night in Dubai, Arrogate ran a hole in the desert wind. It might have come early in the racing year, but it was enough to make Arrogate the World’s Best Racehorse last year.