Since the Eclipse Awards began in 1972, all 40 Horse of the Year honorees also have been named the champion of their divisions, from Secretariat (2-year-old champ of 1972) to Havre de Grace (champion older female in 2011). This at first seems entirely logical: How can you be the best of the best if you’re not the best of your own division? The second-ranked beagle can’t be Best in Show at Westminster.
Skip to main content
Create Your DRF Account
New to DRF?
Everything you could possibly
need in one place
need in one place
Register
Don't have an account?
Register Here
DRF Past Performances
LAS VEGAS – Last week, a lot of people back East were trying to get out of the path of Superstorm Sandy. John Ferraro, a 64-year-old physician from Clifton Park, N.Y., had another reason to get out of town: he was playing in the Pick the Ponies handicapping tournament at the LVH Hotel-Casino.
“We fly out of Albany and they canceled all the flights to the east and south,” Ferraro said. “We were lucky to have a non-stop flight because the five other flights to Vegas had connections in other airports that were closed. If we didn’t have that exact flight, we wouldn’t have made it.”
News travels fast in the western Kansas town of Leoti (pop. 1,563), so when Janis Whitham heard that Thursday, Nov. 8, was going to be hailed as Fort Larned Day in honor of her Breeders’ Cup Classic winner, she stopped by City Hall to check it out with the mayor, Lori Elder-Christensen.
“I was at the post office earlier,” Whitham noted, “and somebody said, ‘Congratulations on that race! I saw the sign in your yard, and I was up at the bank, where there’s pictures and everything.’ ”
That would be Western State Bank, run by Stewart Whitham, Jan’s son.
After a year full of disappointments, the 2012 racing season came to a climax in the Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita on Saturday, with Game On Dude and Wise Dan trying to prove - in separate races - that they deserved the Eclipse Award as Horse of the Year.
The day produced an unequivocal championship performance and what ought to be a clear-cut winner of racing's highest honor. Wise Dan is the champ. He excelled on the day that Game On Dude flopped.
On a day when Royal Delta delivered a brilliant performance to defeat an all-star field in the Breeders' Cup Ladies' Classic, one of the prime topics of conversation at Santa Anita was not about horses. It was about the drug Lasix.
When Game On Dude runs in the Breeders’ Cup Classic Saturday, he can probably lock up the Horse of the Year title with a victory. Yet the nation’s richest and most significant race won’t necessarily be the dramatic high point in two days of racing at Santa Anita.
Allen Jerkens stood at the mile chute gap on the Churchill Downs backstretch and stared at the merciless autumn sky. He wore the expression of a man who’d just run over his own dog.
“I don’t know what the hell I’ve got to do to win one of these,” Jerkens said.
Whether you are an advocate or an opponent of permitting the raceday use of furosemide (Salix) on racehorses, there is no denying that racing has a problem when the first year of a Salix ban at the Breeders’ Cup produces a 50 percent decline in entries for nation’s richest 2-year-old races. You also have to wonder what will happen a year from now when Salix, formerly called Lasix, is scheduled to be prohibited from all 15, rather than just five, of the Breeders’ Cup races.