2023 Eclipse Awards: Chad Brown

Gone are the days when Chad Brown battled against the label of turf trainer. Brown has plenty of high-end horses for the main track now. Nonetheless, his bread and butter remains green.

Brown ranked sixth among American trainers in 2023 wins with 206. Narrow the standings to turf races, and Brown was the runaway leader, his 113 wins 21 more than Phil D’Amato’s second-leading total.

:: Full list of 2023 Eclipse Awards finalists, including profile stories

You already know that Brown had more graded stakes winners on turf than any other trainer, but those standings still are arresting: Brown had 29 such winners (about 14 percent of his overall win total), D’Amato 18, with Todd Pletcher sending out the third-highest total, 11. The distance between first and third is a vast chasm, not a gap.

Brown, a four-time Eclipse winner and a 2023 finalist for the award, trained nine individual Grade 1 winners in 2023 and won two Breeders’ Cup races; the Juvenile Fillies Turf with Hard to Justify and the PNC Bank Filly and Mare Sprint with Goodnight Olive, who repeated in the race. Brown had seven different Grade 1 turf winners, led, as often, by a powerhouse group of older fillies and mares: In Italian started her season with Grade 1 wins in the Jenny Wiley and Just a Game, then was narrowly beaten by Whitebeam in the Grade 1 Diana and by Gina Romantica in the Grade 1 First Lady. Brown trained both those horses, too.

Brown also sent out Marketsegmentation to victory in the Grade 1 New York, and in December won California Grade 1 turf contests on consecutive days when Program Trading captured the Hollywood Derby and Surge Capacity the Matriarch.

This was not Chad Brown’s best year as a trainer, but he remained one of the best trainers in America.

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