Trainers have been heard talking up their horses since the dawn of the Thoroughbred, so when Serge Foucher, the man who trained Kauto Star when he raced in France, described the horse as “The Extraterrestrial” it sounded like another dose of hype.

He was quoted as saying: “I have not seen a horse like him. There were tears all around here when the owner sold him. I will never encounter another like him. Everyone called him not by his name but, instead, L’Extraterrestre – The Extraterrestrial, because he was not a horse normal for this world.”

In the intervening years Kauto Star’s 12 Grade One victories had added substance to Foucher’s comments, but it was the style of his latest victory, in the William Hill King George VI Chase at Kempton Park, that has elevated him to the pantheon reserved for the greats – and that is official.

The simple facts are that he won the race by a distance that has been calculated at 36 lengths, which extends the previous record winning margin when Captain Christy, a horse who would make most people’s list of great steeplechasers, beat Bula by 30 lengths in 1975.

Paul Nicholls, the man who took over training Kauto Star, was in no doubt about what he had seen. “That’s the best he’s ever been. I don’t know about going backwards – he seems to be going forwards. I think that’s his best performance yet and everything at home, for the last two weeks, suggested it. I knew he’d come on a ton from Haydock [when he won the Betfair Chase]. When you’re training these horses you have targets – you don’t have them at their best by a long way on their first run of the season. You’ve got to let them improve and he’s done nothing but bloom since that day.”

The rare flowering of a true great left Phil Smith, the British Horseracing Authority’s head of handicapping, with a conundrum. His job revolves around weights and measures, deciding what weight should be allocated to each horse in a handicap to provide the measure of equality required. When it comes to assessing the stellar end of the scale there is also an element of setting performances within historical context and Smith was already dusting off his slide-rule and calculator.

Minutes after the race he was simply trying to take in the magnitude of what he and 22,000 others had just witnessed. “You don’t see King Georges won like that,” he said. “It looked a good field to me beforehand – there was only Denman and the Irish horses missing. I thought he’d win by 10 lengths.”

Smith was left with two alternatives. Believe that the likes Madison Du Berlais in second, third-placed Barbers Shop and Nacarat – whose trail-blazing pace had set up a time that was eight seconds faster than the Grade One novice chase on the same card –  had all run below par or accept that this was the steeplechasing performance of this decade and a couple of others.

“Even if we go on Barbers Shop at 156 Kauto’s got to be high 180s, low 190s and that’s leaving Barbers Shop on 156. And if Barbers Shop came here for the Racing Post Chase on 156 you’d back him. So you think that I’ve got to do something with him because he’s beaten Nacarat – who’s 162.”

What Smith decided to do was to raise Kauto Star’s rating to 195, which puts him 10lbs ahead of Desert Orchid, who achieved his best performance when carrying 12st 3lb to victory in the 1990 Racing Post Chase at Kempton.

Handicappers tend to place more value on handicap form because these races are run at a truer pace but Nacarat ensured the tempo to overcome that caveat and Kauto Star did the rest. “The race was set up for
him to put up a great performance,” Smith pointed out. “It was like one of the race with Coe and Ovett, where they had pacemakers to set world-record times, and it was that type of race.”

If Kauto Star’s next race, which will be the totesport Cheltenham Gold Cup in March, is not to turn into a very private affair a contender needs to arrive pretty quickly.

The best of the Irish prospects are running in the Lexus Chase at
Leopardstown today and Imperial Commander (who was badly let down by his jumping in the King George) has an outside chance but the most realistic opposition is closer to home with Kauto Star’s stable companion, Denman, who laid down his own marker when he lumped top weight around Newbury to win the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury.

However, to put that into perspective, Denman won the Hennessy off a rating of 174. If Kauto Star had run of that mark, and put in this performance, he might have won by the length of Oxford Street. “Denman put his name in the hat with an awesome performance, Kauto’s gone and done the same now,” Nicholls said. “Denman’s got another run of course [in the Aon
Chase at Newbury], but it’s going to make thing really interesting come March.”

If Denman can make a fight of it then we could be in for a race that is out of this world.