It would be pummeling a dead something to belabor the obvious and whine about the trio deemed as worthy finalists for the 2012 Eclipse Award in the so-called glamor division for 3-year-old colts. Let’s just say all three are gearing up for stud duty as 4-year-old stallions and leave it at that.

Imagine being the guest of honor at a farewell party and then being asked to provide the entertainment and clean up the mess.

Coil, that resplendent chestnut son of Point Given, had done enough in a lifetime of 13 races to have deserved a cherry-picked cakewalk for the final start of his career. Instead, the hero of the 2011 Haskell and 2012 Santa Anita Sprint Championship was asked to empty the tank one more time last Saturday at Santa Anita Park in the San Pasqual Stakes when Ultimate Eagle, unimpressed by his accomplished elder, put up a noble fight that was too good to lose.

“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”

– “The Great Gatsby”

Chris McCarron, age 57, is a retired Hall of Fame jockey who runs the North American Racing Academy in Lexington, Ky. By McCarron’s count, the 19 graduates of his program currently competing in North America have won more than 1,700 races. So what was McCarron’s reaction to the announcement that fellow Hall of Famer Gary Stevens, age 49, is coming out of retirement?

“I guess I’m not making jockeys fast enough,” he said.

The tax-code changes passed last week by both houses of the U.S. Congress would have sent American horseplayers flying off a fiscal cliff had it not contained an exemption allowing them to continue deducting gambling losses against winnings regardless of new caps on itemized deductions.

It really doesn’t do a horse any good to win the Sham Stakes, at least in terms of making a mark in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, or Belmont Stakes later on. Then again, it does no harm to try.

LAS VEGAS – The NFL playoffs are finally here after a regular season that had more ups and downs than Kim Kardashian’s Celebrity Quotient (Q rating).

The average 41-year-old husband and father of two young children will have stored on his iPhone a photo collection of the kids at play and the family on holiday, especially around this time of year.

Garrett Gomez, being anything but average, scanned past such benign images and settled on a picture that at first glance appeared to be the schematic design for a 21st century waffle iron, or maybe the latest installation on exhibit in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

Aristotle said it first and then Sigmund Freud carried the ball, suggesting that dreams are “thinking that persists in a state of sleep.” It follows then that the more a person thinks about a particular subject – say, the decline of Thoroughbred racing as popular American pastime – the more his or her dreams will be colored by the anxieties and hope-filled wishes focused on that subject during the waking day, unless that person had a late night bowl of chicken vindaloo chased by a cherry brandy. Then they get the dreams they deserve.

The Malibu Stakes at Santa Anita on Wednesday was the last of the 112 Grade 1 races run in the United States during 2012. A survey of the results (a full listing of them can be found on my blog) suggests an unusual lack of dominance by individual horses but an increasing concentration of success by the sport’s elite trainers and jockeys.

Vote for the Eclipse Awards long enough and you get to know just about everybody who is up for anything at all. Most of the time this is no big deal – the deserving winners stick out like a neon thumb, with neither explanation nor apology required. Only the delusional complain.

Sometimes, though, it can be a tough call, and there will be a palpable sigh heard across the land, closely followed by a twinge of voter’s remorse, when one highly qualified candidate or another comes up short in the count.