Enable gets it done in King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes

Enable won her 11th race in a row, but not without a struggle, as Crystal Ocean gave the great mare all she could handle Saturday at Ascot in the Group 1 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

Overcoming a wide draw and a ground-losing trip under Frankie Dettori, Enable got up onto Crystal Ocean’s back with more than a quarter-mile to run in the 1 1/2-mile King George. Enable forged to a half-length lead with about a furlong-and-a-half remaining before Crystal Ocean battled back along the inside, getting nearly onto even terms with Enable before she finished him off.

The official margin of victory was a neck, the nearest anyone has come to beating Enable during her long winning streak except for last fall’s Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, where the late filly Sea of Class missed by a head.

It is the Arc that has brought Enable back into training this year at age 5 as her connections, owner-breeder Khalid Abdullah and trainer John Gosden, seek to make their mare the first three-time Arc winner. She remains favored for the early October tilt at Longchamp but Enable appears to be a bigger, heavier horse this season, and after capturing her seasonal debut, the Group 1 Eclipse Stakes, by three-quarters of a length over Magical, Enable was put to the test Saturday.

Crystal Ocean, deemed the current top-rated horse in the Longines World Thoroughbred Rankings on the strength of a 1 1/4-length win over Magical in the Group 1 Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot, came into the King George in cracking form and got first run on Enable under James Doyle. Doyle helped keep his mount in the game until time and space ran out, as Enable, in receipt of three pounds from the runner-up, proved slightly too much in the end.

Waldgeist appeared to run to his better form finishing third, 1 1/4 lengths behind Crystal Ocean while far clear of fourth place Salouen. The Japanese horse Cheval Grand finished a moderate sixth, while Anthony Van Dyck, winner of the Derby at Epsom this year, beat only stablemate Magic Wand in an 11-runner field.

Enable is by Nathaniel out of Concentric, by Sadler’s Wells, and she now has won 12 times from 13 starts. Her connections said she could have won race before the Arc, probably at York, either in the Yorkshire Oaks or the Juddmonte International.