PALM BEACH, Fla. – Led by Sovereignty, the Horse of the Year and champion 3-year-old male, 10 of the 11 Eclipse Award- winning horses from 2025 are being pointed to campaigns in 2026.
The only champion not returning in 2026 is Thorpedo Anna, the older dirt female Eclipse winner and 2024 Horse of the Year, who has been retired. She will be bred to Gun Runner.
The Eclipse Awards were announced Thursday night at a rapidly moving ceremony held at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla.
PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Sovereignty, who in 2025 won the Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, and Travers as part of a 5-for-6 campaign, was voted Horse of the Year, capping another big night at the Eclipse Awards for Godolphin, the global racing and breeding operation headed by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.
While there figures to be some drama in categories such as older dirt male, jockey, and perhaps trainer, Thursday’s Eclipse Awards ceremony in South Florida is expected to be another big night for Godolphin, the global racing and breeding operation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruling leader of Dubai.
Bob Duncan, credited with revolutionizing the starting-gate experience for horses while working on and eventually heading the New York Racing Association gate crew for five decades, will be honored with a Special Eclipse Award for Career Excellence, it was announced Wednesday.
Duncan will be presented with the award at the 55th annual Eclipse Awards ceremony on Jan. 22 at The Breakers Palm Beach in Florida.
Ed Bowen, the longtime racing historian, author, and journalist who died in January 2025, will be posthumously awarded the Eclipse Award of Merit in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding achievement in the Thoroughbred industry, it was announced Tuesday.
Bowen will be celebrated at the Eclipse Awards ceremony on Jan. 22 at The Breakers Palm Beach in Florida.
Trevor Denman’s world today is a long way from the California tracks where he spent decades developing a reputation as a ground-breaking race caller.
Denman’s home is a farm in southern Minnesota, about 75 miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
“You should see my farm,” he said in a weekend interview, looking onto the property. “There’s a forest line over there and small mountains to my left. I’ve got a mile-long driveway. This is heaven.”
A gentleman named Jay Bernardini ranked 26th among North American trainers with 108 wins during 2025. Sitting 27th, with 106 winners, came Bill Mott. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
Mott won 13 graded races during the year. The top three in the land took down 35, 28, and 26.
The statistical case simply doesn’t exist for Mott to be an Eclipse Award finalist. It hasn’t for decades and never will again. But we all know, at least in our hearts, that the numbers only carry so much weight, that piling up wins has everything to do with opportunity and approach.
Cool Jet did not just beat his rivals in three graded stakes in Virgina and South Carolina in the spring and fall of 2025. He trounced them.
Those victories have made Cool Jet a finalist for the Eclipse Award as the nation’s champion steeplechase horse of 2025.
Owned by Riverdee Stable and trained by Jack Fisher, Cool Jet won 3 of 6 starts and earned $190,500 in 2025, by far the most successful season of a career that began in Ireland in 2020.
It was, in fact, a down year for Chad Brown.
Nearly every horse trainer on the planet would kill to have a Chad Brown down year.
Brown won 28 graded stakes, far fewer than the 47 he notched in 2024 and his career-best 54 in 2019. His 203 wins during 2025 ranked eighth among Brown seasons, and $24.5 million in purse earnings were roughly $6.5 million less than his 2024 total.
Brad Cox during 2025 won more purse money than any North American trainer and more races and graded stakes than all but two.
Yet Cox could look back over the season and wonder what might have been.
Tappan Street beat Horse of the Year favorite Sovereignty in the Grade 1 Curlin Florida Derby presented by Hill ‘n’ Dale Farms at Xalapa, but when Sovereignty was out winning the Kentucky Derby presented by Woodford Reserve, Tappan Street had started his recovery from a surgically repaired injury sustained shortly before the big event.
