The envelope, please

As we inch closer to the Eclipse Awards ceremony and the widely-anticipated announcement of Horse of the Year for 2010, I thought I would use this blog to reveal the horses I voted for, even though I was not originally planning on doing so.  This is my 15th year as an Eclipse Award voter, and I still find the task as enjoyable as my first time, way back when I was the turf writer for The Trentonian newspaper in Trenton, N. J., though I remember I did not write a column about how thrilled I was to be a first-time voter, even though I personally thought it was a big deal. 

Anyway, the sport of horse racing has changed over the years (not for the better, in my opinion) as has the media who cover it (anybody who creates a blog is now considered an expert) but the process of deciding what horses and people should receive an Eclipse vote has not, thankfully.  As an aside, if there were such things as blogs, web pages and the Internet when I was still in high school, I could have become a bona fide turf writer years before I first started pulling down a legitimate paycheck for an honest-to-goodness publication.

Here are the votes, and as you will note, there are no surprises here:

2-year-old filly - Awesome Feather
2-year-old colt - Uncle Mo
3-year-old colt - Lookin at Lucky
3-year-old filly - Blind Luck
Older Male - Blame
Older Female - Zenyatta
Male Turf - Gio Ponti
Female Turf - Goldikova
Male Sprinter - Big Drama
Female Sprinter - Dubai Majesty
Steeplechaser - Slip Away
Trainer - Todd Pletcher
Owner - WinStar Farm
Breeder - Claiborne and Dilschneider
Jockey - Ramon Dominguez
Apprentice - Omar Moreno
Horse of the Year - Zenyatta