Long before he stormed through the uphill stretch to record a narrow win in the Grade 1 American Grand National Hurdle Stakes on Oct. 18 at Far Hills Racecourse in New Jersey, the Irish-bred gelding Zanahiyr was better known for losses in major races in Britain and Ireland.
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.
In slightly more than three months in 2025, Swore went from a maiden race winner to a multiple stakes winner over hurdles. With that meteoric rise, Swore is a finalist for the Eclipse Award as the nation’s champion steeplechase horse of 2025.
Swore ended his 2024 season with a sixth-place finish in an allowance race at Aqueduct for owner and breeder Stone Farm and trainer Graham Motion. The entirety of his 2025 season was over obstacles under the direction of trainer Keri Brion.
Four-year-old Nysos notched four graded stakes victories in five 2025 starts, defending the West Coast with relentless precision and quietly putting together one of the best campaigns of his class over the course of eight months.
Bred in Kentucky by Susie Atkins, Nysos was sired by Nyquist out of the unraced mare Zetta Z. He went to auction three times between 2021 and 2023 and was ultimately purchased for $550,000 by Baoma Corp. at the 2023 Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co. spring sale of 2-year-olds in training.
At the end of another stellar campaign, Sierra Leone came within a half-length of one of racing’s most mythical achievements.
Since the Longines Breeders’ Cup Classic was first run in 1984, 13 winners have returned to run in the race the following year. Tiznow, a solo titan, remains the only two-time Classic winner. Most returning winners have not come close, with eight finishing out of the money on their second attempt.
If a massive Thoroughbred conglomerate can also be a tight-knit family operation, Spendthrift Farm is such an operation, and it rode its connections to success as both an owner and breeder in 2025.
Remarkably, this would be the first Eclipse Award for Spendthrift, which was founded in 1937 by Leslie Combs II. The farm was revitalized into its current era by the late B. Wayne Hughes, starting in 2004. Hughes died in 2021, and the farm is now owned and overseen by his son-in-law Eric Gustavson and daughter Tammy Hughes Gustavson.
