SO it wasn’t to be. The deflation of those final yards of the Arc were all the harder to take because for a few seconds, it had looked like history might be made when Enable went ahead by over two lengths last Sunday.

The opinion was in some quarters that Waldgeist didn’t get the credit he deserved but when you look at his record against Enable, it was hard not to think that fortune went in his favour this time. Had the winning colt been Japan or Scotsass, we might have felt a little better in that she was been by a great colt. Instead Waldgeist felt like a spoiler rather than a great winner.

Tough, consistent but well beaten three times by Enable and no one looking back at the King George could really have predicted this result. It was a victory for Andre Fabre’s training skill and persistence.

The key was that he’d won a soft ground 10-furlong Group 1 as a two-year-old. Returning to his best form at five, he was best equipped to deal with conditions on Sunday.

Even if the horse was knocked, his jockey Pierre Charles Boudot was lauded for the ride. Shades of Mikael Barzalona in Pour Moi’s Derby though? Rather than producing Waldgeist with a perfectly-timed run, the Arc fell into his hands.

We are lucky to have access to such detailed information, and we need both visual images and time data to assess a race and the individual performances, to see exactly how the race was won and lost. When did the horse get asked for his effort and how fast did he respond?

Did Boudot’s effort deserve more praise than Dettori? He undoubtedly rode ParisLongchamp well over the weekend. But in the Arc, he was pushing his mount along before Dettori did and on soft ground, he was on a horse who had the stamina for the conditions.

If we want riders who helped bring Enable’s defeat, we should also look at William Buick and Donnacha O’Brien.

The strange thing before the race was the lack of a pacemaker by Ballydoyle.

From the off, Magical went forward and we guessed she was in a different role here. Chasing Ghaiyyath, was she used to soften up Enable for Japan?

Remember Ruby Walsh’s summary of the Irish Derby? Sovereign got clear and stayed clear. Walsh, in his tactical analysis, said that the wrong horses were in second and third. They weren’t good enough to go with Sovereign and when they fell away, the rest of the field were too far out of their ground.

We had the reverse in the Arc, the ‘pacemakers’, Ghaiyyath and Magical were too good for Dettori to let them too much rope. They were two of his biggest rivals. The way the race unfolded, he had to keep tabs them and in doing so he just left himself and Enable vulnerable on the soft ground to a ‘slower’ horse who as time analysis proved, kept on at the same pace rather than being produced with a well-timed turn of foot.

She beat Magical by further than she had in three meetings but it was not enough to hold off the late challenge.