Enable, Crystal Ocean, Waldgeist in three-way tie for Longines World's Best Racehorse

World’s Best Racehorse of 2019 – in fact, there were three of them.

Enable, Crystal Ocean, and Waldgeist were announced as the tri-winners of Longines's annual award at a luncheon Wednesday in London.

The three European horses raced against each other during 2019, Enable nipping Crystal Ocean while getting a mare’s weight allowance in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes in July. Crystal Ocean suffered an injury and didn’t race through the end of the European flat season, when Waldgeist flew past heavily favored Enable in the late stages of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Waldgeist had finished third in the King George and third behind Crystal Ocean in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot, and it was only his Arc victory that raised him to the level of Enable and Crystal Ocean.

Enable’s top performance, the one that earned her a 128 rating, came in the Yorkshire Oaks, where she dominated the high-level performer Magical.

The ratings are established by an international panel of racing secretaries and officials and are updated throughout the calendar year. They don’t purport to represent the sum total of an individual horse’s body of work during a season, but rather the highest performance level reached during the year.

Rated 127 was the Hong Kong miler Beauty Generation, whose form had declined by the end of 2019. He hit his high mark Jan. 10 winning the Celebration Cup and was followed in the ratings by four horses at 126. That quartet included Battaash, who had top-class European turf sprint form; Ghaiyyath, who was unable to compete with the likes of Waldgeist and Enable in the Arc, but ran a huge race in the Group 1 Grosser Preis von Baden to hit this mark; and the top-rated American horse, Vino Rosso, who got to his rating by virtue of victory in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Following Vino Rosso among North American-based horses were City of Light at 124, and McKinzie and Mitole at 123. Bricks and Mortar, who was all but certain to be named American Horse of the Year for 2019 this week, hit a top mark of 122.

The Longines World’s Best Race for 2019 was, unsurprisingly, the Arc, which got an aggregate rating of 126.5. The highest-rated American race was the BC Classic at 121.50.