LIKE most horse racing enthusiasts of my acquaintance, I am a sports fan as well, and it takes something special to distract me when an Olympics is taking place.

“Something special” is a fair description of the pick of the equine action at last week’s Yorkshire Ebor Festival: Rio took a back seat, at least for a while.

“Citius, Altius, Fortius” - “Faster, Higher, Stronger” - is the Olympic motto, but “Citius, Citius, Citius” might well have stood as the motto at York. On ground that was firmer than good throughout, fast times prevailed and course records came under threat.

No time was faster, in relative as well as absolute terms, than Mecca’s Angel’s 56.24s in winning the Coolmore Nunthorpe Stakes on the Friday. It was a mere 0.08s (less than a length) outside the brilliant Dayjur’s course-and-distance record, set in this race in 1990.

Fast ground or not (and all the evidence was that it was still fast ground despite rain), it takes a seriously fast horse to run such a time, and Mecca’s Angel is seriously fast. Her timefigure of 129 - the same as she recorded in this race 12 months earlier and what her sectionals at the Curragh the time before strongly suggested she could still manage - is the best of the year so far in Britain and Ireland, demoting Postponed’s Juddmonte International Stakes (dealt with in last week’s Time Will Tell) to second.

It also makes Mecca’s Angel joint-fastest (along with Miss Andretti in the 2007 King’s Stand Stakes at Royal Ascot) by a female in Britain this century.

Unsurprisingly, she achieved it by performing close to peak efficiency, running the last three furlongs of her race in a fraction over 33.0s, or a speed about 102% of her average speed for the race overall: par is 101.6% for York’s five furlongs.

That Mecca’s Angel is one of the best sprinters of recent times is beyond doubt, and that she is more versatile in terms of ground than some have maintained she was should be also.

Sadly, we may not see much more of her on the racetrack, but the runner-up, Limato, promises to be around for some time yet.

His timefigure of 124 would have won this race as often as not in recent years and was just 2 below his excellent July Cup figure. Effective at seven furlongs, and pretty smart even at eight furlongs, he has plenty of options and must continue to prove difficult to beat.