It’s difficult to find more superlatives to describe Songbird, the heavy favorite to earn her second career Eclipse Award. The filly has already run through most standard descriptors. She belted high note after high note in 2016, taking an unchallenged record into her showdown with two older champions in the 2016 Longines Breeders’ Cup Distaff.

The fillies and mares that Eclipse Award finalist Queen’s Trust faced on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016 read like a who’s who of international racing.

“She’s run a lot of people out of her stall, I can tell you that,” trainer John Servis said of Cathryn Sophia. But luckily, the diminutive bay filly put her fighting spirit to good use on the racetrack, taking down one of her division’s signature events to stamp herself as an Eclipse Award finalist.

When the National Steeplechase Association released its pre-season rankings of horses in training for 2016 last February, Top Striker wasn’t among the top half-dozen prospects. That’s understandable, considering Top Striker missed the entire 2015 season and hadn’t won a jump race since taking a stakes for novices in November 2014.

For owner Irv Naylor and trainer Cyril Murphy, the 2016 National Steeplechase Association season was nearly derailed before it even began. Dawalan, who won the Eclipse Award as America’s top steeplechase horse in 2015 after scoring back-to-back Grade 1 wins in the Grand National and Colonial Cup, sustained a bowed tendon during a 1 1/2-mile training race on the flat April 2. Although the injury to the 6-year-old Dawalan was not considered career-ending, it was serious enough to send him to the sidelines for the entire hurdle season.

For much of his career, both in Europe and the United States, Scorpiancer has been an underachiever.

He went through the sales ring three times, the last when he sold for $309,000 at the Brightwells Cheltenham Sale in March 2014. He subsequently went just 1 for 5, his lone victory a maiden hurdle against weak competition during the winter meet at Ludlow Racecourse in England.

B. Wayne Hughes’ Spendthrift Farm took quality over quantity to its extremes on the racetrack in 2016, taking home seven graded stakes wins in just 35 non-partnership starts.

Those seven wins accounted for half of the Lexington, Ky.-based operation’s 14 victories, with total earnings of $2,644,672. Spendthrift’s five Grade 1 wins were the most of any North American owner in 2016.

Ken and Sarah Ramsey have made winning the mission in every facet of their Thoroughbred holdings, both in quality and quantity, and it has paid off in national-level recognition on a yearly basis.

The Nicholasville, Ky., couple has enjoyed rousing success on the racetrack with homebred runners by their sire Kitten’s Joy and through astute navigation of the claiming game.

Prince Khalid bin Abdullah’s Juddmonte Farms has developed into a global superpower over the course of four decades and arguably had North America’s most electrifying runners on dirt and turf in 2016.

On the main track, Arrogate ascended to the top of the 3-year-old division with a 13 1/2-length thrashing of his opponents in the Grade 1 Travers Stakes and put himself in the Horse of the Year discussion with a win over California Chrome in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Just call him Mr. Breeders’ Cup.

No rider in history has won more championship races than Mike Smith, and in 2016 the jockey added to his lore when he snagged three Breeders’ Cup events, led by the $6 million Classic with Arrogate.

But the splash Smith made at Breeders’ Cup was just one aspect of his memorable year. He was aboard Arrogate for his track-record performance in the Travers, and he also teamed regularly with Songbird, who won seven of eight starts in 2016 including the Alabama and Santa Anita Oaks.