THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : Wilson’s Year Badly Eclipsed as Blunders Deny Him Award

The bad news about the Eclipse Awards election is that 72 of the 319 voters didn’t vote, or voted too late to make the counting. The worse news is that the name of Dave Wilson, the best apprentice jockey in Canada, was left off the ballot.

Riding at Hastings Park--formerly Exhibition Park--in Vancouver and moving from that bullring to the big leagues at Woodbine in Toronto later in the year, Wilson rode 139 winners. That’s 46 more than Eclipse Award-winning apprentice Dale Beckner had, and 40 more than any other candidate listed on the information sheet sent to the voters.

Wilson’s purses totaled $1.2 million, which would have ranked him third among the riders on the information sheet. Only Beckner, with $2.3 million, and Ramon Perez, with $1.6 million, had higher totals.

Beckner, after beginning 1994 at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields, moved to New York in April and did most of his winning there. He might very well have won the apprentice award, anyway, but the point is, it was unconscionable that Wilson wasn’t on the ballot. In December, he was a unanimous choice for a Sovereign Award, Canada’s version of the Eclipses, but he was lightly regarded by many Eclipse voters because his credentials were omitted.

How could such an injustice happen?

“What happened was wrong,” said Conrad Sobkowiak, a spokesman for the Thoroughbred Racing Assns. “Wilson should have been on the ballot. It was not correct that he wasn’t listed.”

This is not the first time that the apprentice Eclipse Award has come under fire. Jesus Bracho won the award in 1992, but later it was learned by Florida racing authorities that his experience in his native Valenzuela made him a journeyman instead of an apprentice.

Bracho was stripped of the award--Rosemary Homeister, runner-up in the voting, was given the trophy--and suspended for about 15 months. He resumed riding on Jan. 1 in Florida.

The Eclipse voters come from the TRA, a 41-track trade group that votes through track racing secretaries, the National Turf Writers Assn., and the Daily Racing Form.

The way Sobkowiak explains it, an Eclipse steering committee incorrectly created an impression two years ago that horses and horsemen from Canada wouldn’t be eligible for an award unless they competed in the United States in at least one race. When the list of candidates for the 1994 apprentice award was prepared, Wilson’s name was left off because he had not ridden at a U.S. track.

The TRA’s full name is the Thoroughbred Racing Assns. of North America, Inc. Woodbine and Ft. Erie, both in Canada, are dues-paying members.

What must have happened two years ago is that the steering committee mixed up the rule that pertains to European horses. A horse from Europe must run at least once in North America to be eligible for an Eclipse Award.

In the last several days, alerted by outraged representatives from Canadian tracks, Sobkowiak and others at the TRA offices in Elkton, Md., were trying to find a rule that would get them off the hook in the Wilson affair.

By and large, the rule of thumb in Eclipse voting is that there are no rules, and all they could find was a sheet of onionskin paper, at least 20 years old, from a former steering committee member who dwelled on eligibility rules for European horses.

Wilson’s apprenticeship continues into this year, ending in the spring. But there’s only one year when an apprentice has a serious shot at an Eclipse Award, the year he rides the full 12 months with the weight allowance. Wilson had that year, and it was a year of years as far as performance goes. Too bad the Eclipse voters weren’t told about it.

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When Fred Grossman was editor of the Daily Racing Form, he demanded that his employees vote for the Eclipse Awards if they received ballots. Racing Form correspondents might have written great stuff all year, but if they missed the voting deadline, they were on thin ice with Grossman.

The Monday after the annual Eclipse voting was announced, Grossman would call the TRA offices and bark into the phone, “All right, who are they? Who are the three guys from my place that didn’t vote?”

This time, Grossman would have been especially angry. There were 116 Daily Racing Form voters and 37 of them, or 32%, didn’t vote, or voted after the deadline.

The record of the entire Eclipse Awards electorate was scarcely better. Seventy-two of 319 eligible voters, or 23%, didn’t vote. Seven racing secretaries and 28 turf writers also didn’t vote.

In one division, older male on dirt, the voting was close, with The Wicked North edging out Colonial Affair by three votes. The Wicked North was a deserving winner in a hard-to-figure year, but Colonial Affair’s owners would love to know how those missing 72 voters might have gone.

The TRA said that 29 votes were received after the deadline. The narrow window for the voters to receive their ballots and mail them back was an invitation for this, and the time problem was exacerbated when the ballots were mailed without information about the apprentice jockeys-- all information, not just Dave Wilson’s record.

“A software glitch,” a spokesman for the Daily Racing Form said.

A second mailing had to be made with the statistics on the apprentices.

Mainly because of an impetus from the TRA, the Eclipse Awards committee has recently considered the inclusion of fans in the voting. Well-intended, this is a wrong-headed idea, and a subject for another day. The Eclipse Awards groups should clean up their own houses before they expand into an area that would only multiply the embarrassments.

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Horse Racing Notes

The California Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Assn., the Thoroughbred Owners of California and Santa Anita’s jockeys met this week to smooth the friction that has existed since Dec. 30, when a widespread riders’ boycott was averted by a last-minute settlement in their insurance bargaining with racetracks. “We met to air our differences and discuss what some perceived as problems,” said trainer Richard Mandella, a spokesman for the CHBPA, which is a trainers’ group. “We agreed to put our problems behind us. There may still be some hard feelings, but the jockeys and everybody agreed to get 100% behind the idea of doing the best we can to promote racing.” . . . The Eclipse Awards vote for sprinter wasn’t close, with Cherokee Run getting 170 votes to Soviet Problem’s 68. They were separated by only a head when Cherokee Run won the Breeders’ Cup Sprint. . . . Corey Nakatani rode three winners Friday at Santa Anita.