Timeform Awards: Champion of Europe

WINNER: ACE IMPACT (Timeform rating: 133)

Pedigree Details

Sire: Cracksman

Dam: Absolutly Me

Dam’s sire: Anabaa Blue

Breeder: Mme Waltraut Spanner

Foaled: February 13, 2020

2023 Race Record & Fact file

Races: 6

Wins: 6

Major wins: Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, Prix du Jockey Club, Prix Guillaume d’Ornano

Owner: Ecuries Serge Stempniak/Gousserie Racing

Trainer: Jean-Claude Rouget

The Prix du Jockey Club has been won by colts who have gone on to prove themselves top-class performers in recent seasons. Mishriff, St Mark’s Basilica and Vadeni looked tough acts to follow but that sequence was maintained in 2023 by Ace Impact who ended the season the best horse in Europe in Timeform’s view. His year-end rating of 133 is not only higher than that of all three Prix du Jockey Club winners who preceded him, but also puts him 4 lb clear of the Derby winner Auguste Rodin. Unlike Ace Impact who has been retired to stud, Auguste Rodin will have the opportunity to improve his rating as a four-year-old, but if he doesn’t, it will be the fifth year running that the ‘French Derby’ winner has ended his career with a higher rating than his Epsom counterpart.

The Prix du Jockey Club was one of two highlights in Ace Impact’s unbeaten six-race campaign, the other being the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, which made him the first colt since Dalakhani 20 years earlier to win the two races in the same season. He was therefore also the first to achieve the double since the Prix du Jockey Club’s distance was shortened, not without some controversy, in 2005 from the traditional Derby distance of a mile and a half to ten and a half furlongs.

The only colt previously to win both races since that change was made was Sottsass, though he didn’t win the Arc until he was four, having finished third as a three-year-old in 2019 behind five-year-old Waldgeist who had himself been beaten a short head in the Prix du Jockey Club two years earlier.

Sottsass had given his trainer Jean-Claude Rouget his long-awaited first Arc victory, with Ace Impact now his second (both ridden by Cristian Demuro), but Ace Impact had earlier become Rouget’s sixth winner of the Prix du Jockey Club, five of those wins coming in the last eight renewals. Vadeni, the 2022 winner who went on to win the Eclipse before finishing a half-length second to Alpinista in the Arc, was another top-class colt, but the best of Rouget’s previous Jockey Club winners was his 2016 winner Almanzor. Like Ace Impact, he too achieved a rating of 133, though he didn’t contest the Arc, completing the double of the Irish Champion Stakes and the Champion Stakes at Ascot instead.

There was a common factor in Ace Impact’s two biggest wins; quick ground. There’s nothing unusual about that at Chantilly in June but such conditions at Longchamp in October are a different matter. Or are they? The latest Arc was the eighth since 2000 to be run on what Timeform has called ‘good to firm’ ground. That compares with seven editions run on ‘soft’ or ‘heavy’ in the same period. Admittedly, the three Arcs prior to the latest one were all run in the mud, and you had to go back to Found’s win in 2016 (the first of two renewals which took place at Chantilly while Longchamp was being redeveloped) for the last Arc run on ground firmer than good.

Timeform’s going assessments are based on evidence from race times and are independent of ‘official’ going descriptions. Ace Impact’s winning time for the Arc (along with other results on the day) certainly made a nonsense of France Galop’s description of ‘bon souple’, or at least its literal translation of ‘good to soft’. In practice, that usually corresponds to what we would consider ‘good’ ground, but Ace Impact’s time was the fastest since Danedream’s race record set in 2011, indicating conditions were unquestionably on the firm side.

The quick conditions at Longchamp were ideal for Ace Impact to show off his best asset, his turn of foot, which he’d already demonstrated to some effect on a similar surface in the Prix du Jockey Club where he lowered the course record previously held by Sottsass. Favourite Big Rock, who was to prove best back at a mile later in the year, winning the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes with a dominant display from the front, made a bold bid to make all, but while he had most of the field in trouble, the patiently-ridden Ace Impact readily cut into his lead when Demuro pulled him wide to begin his run in the straight and swept past the leader inside the final furlong to win by three and a half lengths.

Although he was unbeaten in three starts before the Prix du Jockey Club, Ace Impact’s starting price of 9/1 at Chantilly reflected the fact that he was taking a big step up in grade. Unraced at two, he’d made his winning debut in a race for newcomers on the polytrack at Cagnes-sur-Mer at the end of January, followed up in a minor event (on soft ground) at Bordeaux at the beginning of April, and then won a listed race at Chantilly over a distance just short of the Jockey Club trip in May, a race Sottsass had also won beforehand.

In the end, Ace Impact was given just the one start between the Prix du Jockey Club and the Arc, but rather than take in the traditional Arc trial for three-year-olds, the Prix Niel three weeks before the big race, Rouget ran him instead in the Prix Guillaume d’Ornano at Deauville in August when a bid for the following month’s Irish Champion Stakes was still on the table – Almanzor had been prepped for Leopardstown in the same race. Ace Impact accomplished his task with something in hand, beating the previous season’s National Stakes winner Al Riffa by three quarters of a length.

Ultimately though, Ace Impact went straight to Longchamp next where he was sent off the 19/10 favourite despite never having run over a mile and a half before, not that the extra distance was expected to be a problem for him, particularly with underfoot conditions favouring speed rather than stamina. As it turned out, the lack of an out-and-out gallop put the emphasis even more on speed. In the absence of Auguste Rodin, Ace Impact’s three-year-old opponents included St Leger winner Continuous and Grand Prix de Paris winner Feed The Flame, though both of those had finished behind him at Chantilly. Potentially bigger threats, however, were top-class older rivals from Britain, Hukum and Westover, who had fought out the finish of the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

Both of those took turns in the lead in the home straight, but while conditions were ultimately too quick for Hukum, Westover fared the better of that pair but he too proved no match for Ace Impact’s finish which took him past most of the field in the last couple of furlongs after he’d travelled strongly under another patient ride. Quickening to lead entering the final furlong, Ace Impact went on to win readily by a length and three quarters from Westover, with the previous season’s Irish Champion Stakes runner-up Onesto running a career best in staying on well for third ahead of the Japanese mare Through Seven Seas who just kept Continuous out of the frame.

Ace Impact therefore became the first three-year-old to win the Arc without having raced at two since Rail Link in 2006. Three-year-old colts used to have something of a stranglehold on the Arc, but fillies and mares have won most of the renewals in the last decade or so and, since Rail Link, Ace Impact joins the select group of colts consisting of Sea The Stars, Workforce and Golden Horn – all of those also Derby winners at Epsom – to have won the Arc as three-year-olds.

Given that Ace Impact had raced only six times, his career was less than ten months old and his Arc win had shown him to be better than ever, it was disappointing that his retirement to stud was announced less than a fortnight afterwards. There was surely still more to come from Ace Impact and it was a pity he never got to meet Auguste Rodin, for example.

But there was something rather inevitable about the end of Ace Impact’s racing career given that Dalakhani, Rail Link, Sea The Stars, Workforce and Golden Horn didn’t run again after the age of three, though in Rail Link’s case he did stay in training but was prevented from running again due to injury. The aforementioned Hurricane Run was the last three-year-old colt to win the Arc and race again the following year during which he won the Tattersalls Gold Cup and King George and finished third in his bid to win the Arc again. Golden Horn did at least run again that year after Longchamp, finishing second to future Arc winner Found in the Breeders’ Cup Turf on his final start.

Both Ace Impact’s grandsire and sire certainly justified the decisions to keep them in training at four, Frankel extending his unbeaten record to 14 races with another five Group 1 victories and Cracksman winning the Prix Ganay and Coronation Cup as well as a second Champion Stakes. Ace Impact has proven to be the standout performer from Cracksman’s first crop. Bought for what now looks a bargain €75,000 at Deauville as a yearling (his winnings amounted to just shy of €4m), Ace Impact is a half-brother to four other winners, two of them placed in listed company in France, while his dam Absolutly Me (by an ‘old-style’ Prix du Jockey Club winner, Anabaa Blue) won twice at a mile in France, including on her debut at two, and she too was placed in listed races.

You have to go a few generations further back in Ace Impact’s pedigree to find others who won at the top level. His great grandam was a half-sister to Ibn Bey, a four-time Group 1 winner in Europe, including in the Irish St Leger, and runner-up in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, and to Yorkshire Oaks winner Roseate Tern who was also placed in the Oaks and St Leger. Their dam was a half-sister to the dam of high-class racemare Ouija Board, who was herself third in the Arc, and who went on to become dam of 2014 Derby winner Australia. Ace Impact will stand at the Haras de Beaumont in Normandy for €40,000 in 2024.

RUNNER-UP: WESTOVER (131)

Pedigree Details

Sire: Frankel

Dam: Mirabilis

Dam’s sire: Lear Fan

Breeder: Juddmonte

Foaled: April 24, 2019

2023 Race Record & Fact file

Races: 5

Wins: 1

Major wins: Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud

Owner: Juddmonte

Trainer: Ralph Beckett

Principal Rider: Rob Hornby

Westover won only once during the latest campaign, landing the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud in July, but he ran well to finish runner-up on his other four outings at the top level. He chased home the best horse in the world, Equinox, on his reappearance in the Dubai Sheema Classic, the best filly in the world, Emily Upjohn, in the Coronation Cup, and the best horse in Europe, Ace Impact, on his final start in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

Westover had blown his chance in the 2022 King George by pulling too hard, but he gave a much better account of himself in the latest renewal, putting up a top-class effort to lose out by just a head to Hukum as the pair pulled four and a half lengths clear of King of Steel, with Luxembourg a further three and a quarter lengths back in fourth.

Westover and Hukum competed off level weights in the King George but, according to Timeform’s weight-for-age scale, the year-younger Westover should have been receiving 1 lb in a one-and-a-half-mile event at that stage of the season. That is why he emerged with a Timeform rating 1 lb higher than his narrow conqueror.

THIRD: HUKUM (130)

Pedigree Details

Sire: Sea The Stars

Dam: Aghareed

Dam’s sire: Kingmambo

Breeder: Shadwell

Foaled: April 2, 2017

2023 Race Record & Fact file

Races: 3

Wins: 2

Major wins: Brigadier Gerard Stakes, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes

Owner: Shadwell

Trainer: Owen Burrows

Principal Rider: Jim Crowley

Hukum’s career looked in doubt after he sustained a hind-leg fracture while winning the Coronation Cup in 2022, but he proved better than ever at the age of six in the latest season.

Hukum had been largely raced at trips of a mile and a half or beyond – he was fifth in the 2020 St Leger – but he showed an impressive amount of pace to inflict a first defeat on Derby winner Desert Crown in a steadily-run edition of the Group 3 Brigadier Gerard Stakes over a mile and a quarter at Sandown in May. Hukum, who like Desert Crown was returning from nearly a year off, was caught in trouble at a key stage of the race, but he quickened up sharply once in the clear and hit the front close home.

Conditions were deemed too quick for Hukum to contest the Hardwicke Stakes at Royal Ascot, but he produced the performance of his career at that venue a month later, getting the better of a titanic tussle with Westover to land the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes by a head. That was a top-class effort and, while Hukum disappointed in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the King George form was represented admirably by Westover at Longchamp.

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