HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Chad Brown was disappointed that he did not win the Eclipse Award as leading trainer in 2014 and knows that the honor likely will go to someone else again when the 2015 winners are announced at Gulfstream Park next Saturday, Jan. 16. But Brown doesn’t need a trophy on his mantelpiece to rightfully take pride in what he and his barn have accomplished over the last two years.

When the Eclipse Award for outstanding trainer is dispensed next Saturday night, the winner will be the latest answer to a riddle that has surrounded the title since its inception: Is the trainer of the year the trainer of the Horse of the Year or the trainer who had the best overall season?

There is no definitive answer in the past performances. At the 44 awards ceremonies since the Eclipse era began in 1971, the Horse of the Year’s trainer has won the award only 12 times, and there has been no particular rhyme or reason to why it happens when it does.

American Pharoah dominated racing in 2015, and he and those connected to him dominated the voting to determine the Eclipse Award finalists for 2015, which were announced Wednesday.

American Pharoah – who swept the Triple Crown, beat elders in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, and won seven times in eight starts last year – is a finalist for Horse of the Year and champion 3-year-old male, both of which he is certain to win, and trainer Bob Baffert, jockey Victor Espinoza, and owner and breeder Zayat Stables are finalists in their respective categories.

Mary Simon, a racing historian and writer, has been named the Eclipse Award winner in the audio/multimedia Internet category for a piece that ran on the Daily Racing Form website examining 1915 Kentucky Derby winner Regret and her connections, according to the administrators of the awards.

Eclipse Award ballots are due Saturday at 3 p.m. Eastern, which gives you less than 48 hours to tell me why the following 1-2-3 selections do not meet with your approval:

Two-year-old male: 1-Nyquist, 2-Mohaymen, 3-Airoforce

The undefeated Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner with three Grade 1 victories should be a unanimous selection.

Two-year-old filly: 1-Songbird, 2-Rachel’s Valentina, 3-Carina Mia

Not to repeat myself, but this undefeated Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies winner with three Grade 1 victories should be a unanimous selection.

Leonard Lavin, the beauty-supplies magnate whose Glen Hill Farm has bred more than 80 stakes winners, has been selected to receive the Eclipse Award of Merit, an honor created in 1976 to recognize a “lifetime of outstanding achievement” in racing.

Lavin, 96, is the 40th individual to be selected for the Award of Merit, considered by many to be the highest honor in racing. He will receive the award Jan. 16 at the Eclipse Awards dinner at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla.

The heavy responsibility of deciding who gets an Eclipse Award falls upon the shoulders of 282 voters who received e-ballots this week. As one of them, I clicked the appropriate prompts and discovered, much to my delight, that a wave of memories welled up, not unlike Proust’s involuntary flood of remembrances unlocked by the nibble of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea.

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me,” he wrote in Swann’s Way.

La Verdad, among the leading filly and mare sprinters in the country, was disqualified from her victory in the Grade 2 Honorable Miss at Saratoga, and her trainer, Linda Rice, will serve a 15-day suspension as a result of the horse testing positive for clenbuterol, New York racing regulators announced on Saturday.

The Eclipse Awards dinner is set for Jan. 16 at Gulfstream Park, which means the sponsors have less than two months to figure out a way to make it exciting. Right now, the event figures to provide about as much drama as the 1998 Academy Awards.

Best Picture? “Titanic.”

Best Director? “Titanic.”

Best score, sound, cinematography, editing? “Titanic,” “Titanic,” “Titanic,” “Titanic.”

My “L.A. Confidential” never had a chance.

Organizers of the Eclipse Awards have made changes to the awards’ voting criteria to emphasize that horses who have made all or most of their starts on turf should no longer be eligible to win the champion older male or older female Eclipse Awards, the organizers said Thursday.

Under new guidelines going into effect for 2015, the criteria for the starts that will be considered in both older male and female categories “will be limited to dirt or main-track races,” the organizers said. “Main-track” in this case refers to artificial surfaces.