THE absence of this column last week means that a few significant horseracing events were missed, none more so than the Dubai World Cup at Meydan.

In winning the race, Arrogate cemented his position as the best active racehorse in the world and became the sport’s largest equine money-earner in history for good measure.

A defeat of his high-class fellow American Gun Runner by two and a quarter lengths does not in itself justify claims that Arrogate is one of the all-time greats, and neither does an overall time performance that I make to be worth 127 on the Timeform scale (on which flat figures run from 0 to 140 and sometimes more), though there are likely to be only a handful of better scores recorded anywhere in the world this year.

But the way Arrogate won the race – or that he won the race at all – makes those claims far from fanciful.

He was squeezed out at the start, then had to circle the field, and yet overcame both that and strong opposition to win comfortably.

arrears

Thanks to Trakus’ state-of-the-art sectional timing, we know that Arrogate was 0.81s and 0.82s (about five lengths) in arrears after 100 metres of the three horses who ended up following him home, and that was through no fault of his own.

He also covered 10 metres (or nearly four lengths) more than those rivals on average through the whole race as a result of being forced into going the long way round.

It is by no means far-fetched to suggest that Arrogate could have won by a double-digit number of lengths with a perfect set-up in the race and if ridden out to the line, which would have seen his rating go much higher.

A time 1.45s quicker than he did record – which is about the magnitude involved had things gone perfectly – would have had him running a 140 timefigure.

Some of the post-race talk about Arrogate was a little over the top: he is probably not yet a Frankel, let alone a Secretariat, the legendary US horse of the 1970s.

But he was much better than the result here, and had previously smashed a long-standing record in the Travers and also comfortably run down a top-notch California Chrome in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Let’s enjoy that for now, for he may not be in action for much longer.