Lion the pride and joy as he outpoints stablemate Enable for main prize

Often Cartier's Horse of the Year award is an open-and-shut case, heralding a standout performer with a matchless body of work. This year, although the likelihood was that, like so many other awards on the night, it would fall to a resident of John Gosden's Clarehaven Stables, the debate went right to the wire.

The groundswell of sentiment was almost certainly for the bold filly Enable, the Older Horse of the Year, who had overcome adversity –never a bad thing to do for awards purposes – to annex two of the world's biggest prizes in an end-of-season smash and grab raid.

Cold logic, however, favoured the younger man. The Three-Year-Old Colt of the Year, whose immature playboy antics – not so much of a selling point – had been trained out of him to the point where he delivered five Group-race victories, four of them Group 1s, in a campaign that lasted from April to November.