Starting with her first race at 3, Blind Luck showed what a thrilling year it would be. She rallied from last to win the Grade 1 Las Virgenes Stakes at Santa Anita on Feb. 13 by a nose, setting the stage for a season full of heart-stopping finishes.

With the exception of one rocky plane ride, Turbulent Descent’s first season of racing went much smoother than her name might suggest. Undefeated in three starts, she capped her campaign with a win in the Grade 1 Hollywood Starlet in December and is now a finalist for champion 2-year-old filly of 2010.

“For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’ ”
– John Greenleaf Whittier

The most exciting question of the 2010 racing season was left unanswered: How good might Eskendereya have been?

ANN AND JERRY MOSS

Ann and Jerry Moss have a small broodmare band that produces outsized success, often putting the California couple among the nation’s leading breeders by percentage of winners and stakes winners from starters. But in 2010, as in 2008 and 2009, an inexpensive yearling purchase put the Mosses at the top of the game as owners.

Trainer Eric Guillot and Southern Equine Stable LLC had clearly defined goals for Champagne d’Oro from the beginning. Through 14 career starts she has never run in an allowance race, or in any type of claiming race. She raced against stakes company in the Cinderella and Landaluce last year as a 2-year-old in her second and third starts, when she was a maiden.

Like fine wine, Dubai Majesty is improving with age, and her progress has been steady.

Dubai Majesty, bred in Florida by Harold J. Plumley, raced three times in 2007 as a 2-year-old and won once, a victory in a $50,000 maiden claiming race.

Trainer David Fawkes had a definite plan for Big Drama’s 2010 campaign: Bring him back fresh for the second half of the season, race him exclusively at distances of six and seven furlongs, and point to the Sentient Jet Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Churchill Downs.

Fawkes’s plan worked to perfection, with the end result being a victory on Breeders’ Cup Day and a spot for Big Drama as one of the three finalists for a 2010 Eclipse Award in the sprint division.

It is an unusual year when Juddmonte Farms does not have an impact at the top of the game. Given that, 2010 was not an unusual year.

In Europe, Juddmonte’s 3-year-old colt Workforce won the two most famous races in the Old World, the Epsom Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, while in North America, the 5-year-old mare Proviso sailed through the regular season hitting all the right notes to land among the finalists for champion turf female.

The Celtics, the Yankees, the Steelers – as far as sports dynasties go, they’ve got nothing on Goldikova, who has rendered one of the most challenging events in the Breeders’ Cup canon to nothing more than an elaborate stage for her particular brand of perfection.

The promise was always there.

As a 3-year-old in 2008, Winchester won his American debut in the Grade 1 Secretariat Stakes at Arlington Park. In an abbreviated 2009 campaign, he placed in graded stakes three times.

In 2010, Winchester put those elements together, with the best campaign of his career, one good enough to merit the role as a finalist as the outstanding turf male of 2010.