Making a Case for Top Honors : Horse racing: Black Tie Affair’s victory in the Breeders’ Cup Classic further clouded the horse of the year picture.

Black Tie Affair had barely crossed the finish line to win the climactic event of the Breeders’ Cup when the debate began: Who is America’s horse of the year?

Should it be Black Tie Affair, who won six straight stakes and ended his campaign with a victory in the $3 million Classic, the country’s most definitive championship race?

Should it be the French 2-year-old Arazi, who generated more excitement than any other horse with his electrifying performance in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile?

Should it be the filly Dance Smartly, who was never seriously challenged in winning all seven of her races and was the top money-winning horse on the continent?

Or should it be In Excess, who was considered the front-runner for the title until his trainer ducked a championship confrontation in the Classic?

Opinions vary sharply because there are no official criteria for choosing the horse of the year. While everybody admired Arazi’s one performance in this country, many people argue that the game’s top honor shouldn’t go to a 2 year old; others say it shouldn’t go a horse who has done most of his racing abroad.

Even though there are no published guidelines, it would seem a reasonable standard that any horse-of-the-year candidate must face and defeat top-class competition. This standard quickly disqualifies two of the four candidates for the title.

Dance Smartly won her first six races this year against moderate competition in Canada and then had to work hard to defeat a subpar group of fillies in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff. She certainly wasn’t good enough to have beaten Black Tie Affair or any of the country’s best males; even her admirers would probably concede that.

Yet the best fillies are supposed to be able to beat the best male runners. They get no special dispensations because of their sex. (In the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Turf, Miss Alleged beat some of the world’s best male grass runners -- a more notable performance than anything Dance Smartly did this year.) The Canadian filly is no horse of the year.

In Excess doesn’t deserve the title either, even though his victory in the Woodward Stakes suggested he might be the best older horse in the country. Aside from that race, trainer Bruce Jackson consistently looked for soft spots for his colt, and then avoided the Classic, fearing that In Excess wouldn’t like the Churchill Downs racing strip or the 1 1/4-mile distance.

Voters for the Eclipse Award certainly shouldn’t want to honor horses for taking the path of least resistance or encourage other trainers to earn championships the way Jackson tried to.

Black Tie Affair was admirably consistent, with seven victories in 10 starts. He was versatile enough to beat Housebuster in a sprint and to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic at 1 1/4 miles. He would be an unobjectionable horse of the year. And yet he would have to be considered just about the least-distinguished horse ever to win this title.

Going into the Breeders’ Cup, he had won one Grade I stakes in a 44-race career. He was barely mentioned as a serious horse-of-the-year candidate before he won the Classic under circumstances that amounted to a gift. The jockeys on the other speed horses let him have an uncontested early lead, and after setting a ridiculously slow pace, Black Tie Affair was able to hold on for a 1 1/4-length win.

Ordinarily, the horse who excels at classic distances on the dirt is America’s horse of the year. Only when the candidates are weak, and somebody else is exceptional, do horses in other categories (sprinters, 2 year olds, etc.) merit consideration. This is surely one of those years.

The sport has rarely witnessed such an ambitious feat as that of Arazi, who won six straight stakes on the grass in Europe and then came to Churchill Downs to beat America’s best juveniles on the dirt. Even if Arazi had won narrowly and unimpressively, this would have been an extraordinary achievement. Yet he did it with one of the most electrifying performances U.S. racing fans have witnessed since the days of Secretariat.

The objections to Arazi as horse of the year are mostly technical: He is a 2 year old and he raced only once in the U.S. Yet there is precedent for each of these exceptions. In 1972, when all of the older horses were undistinguished, the 2-year-old Secretariat was named horse of the year. Moreover, voters have conferred other Eclipse awards on horses who have had distinguished campaigns in Europe and have scored a single American victory in the Breeders’ Cup; Miesque won the filly turf title this way in 1987 and 1988.

Years from now, when we look back on the roster of great horses who have been horse of the year, the name of Black Tie Affair would look jarringly out of place. But Arazi belongs there. His feats as a 2 year old have already earned him a secure niche in racing history.