Skip Away Deserves Eclipse Award

Balloting for the 1998 Eclipse Award winners has begun, and voters ought to have little trouble making the right choice between Skip Away and Awesome Again for the horse of the year.

Skip Away, of course, had a distinguished season, winning seven straight stakes races before fading at the end of the year and losing his last two starts. Awesome Again compiled a six-for-six record and finished the year with a victory in the $5.12-million Breeders’ Cup Classic, where he defeated Skip Away in their only head-to-head confrontation.

Nevertheless, Skip Away deserves the sport’s highest honor, and the fact that he was the more talented horse is only part of the reason. Trainer Sonny Hine mapped out a yearlong, coast-to-coast campaign for his colt that included major stakes races in seven different states. Only one of his objectives, the Massachusetts Handicap, could be considered a soft spot. Hine willingly took on all challengers and even admonished Bob Baffert, trainer of Silver Charm, to stop ducking a confrontation and to run his champion against Skip Away.

Trainer Patrick Byrne, by contrast, judiciously picked his spots for Awesome Again. On Oct. 10, when he could have challenged Skip Away and other top horses in the $1-million Jockey Club Gold Cup, he took his colt to Chicago for the Hawthorne Gold Cup and beat a bunch of nobodies. By waiting till the end of the year to give his colt a tough test, he caught Skip Away when he was most vulnerable. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Byrne’s management of his colt was brilliant. But this is not necessarily the type of management that racing fans--and Eclipse voters--should encourage. We want trainers to race their horses as boldly as Hine raced Skip Away--and to reward them when they do. Next year, in particular, it will be especially important that trainers campaign their horses aggressively.

The National Thoroughbred Racing Assn. has created a new series for older horses that begins with the Donn Handicap in January and climaxes with the Pacific Classic at Del Mar in August. The Fox network, which is televising the series, expects the racing industry to put on the best possible show.

If the country’s best horses don’t show up, Fox could lose its enthusiasm for racing.

Skip Away should be the model for future horse-of-the-year candidates. He took on all of the tough challenges. His victories were admirable and his losses came only when he was worn out from trying to do so much.

Most of the other Eclipse Award choices for 1998 were fairly easy, but I deviated from the common wisdom in a few categories and would like to state my cases:

* Sprinter: On the basis of his victory in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint, Reraise will almost certainly win the title. But the speedster raced only five times during the year, and he faced top stakes competition only in that one race at Churchill Downs. Kelly Kip went through a long, strenuous campaign, running six furlongs in 1:08 4/5 or faster at four different tracks and setting a new record of 1:07 3/5 for the distance at Aqueduct. He was faster and tougher than Reraise, and he deserves the championship that he won’t get.

* Two-year-old colt: Answer Lively won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, but his performance wasn’t impressive and it was the colt’s only important stakes victory. Exploit may be the most talented horse of his generation, but he hasn’t done enough to merit an Eclipse Award--yet. So my vote goes to Incurable Optimist, the best young grass horse seen in years. He made four starts on the turf, won them all by a combined total of 29 lengths, and captured the top 2-year-old turf stakes in New York and California. Even though 2-year-old turf specialists usually don’t merit much attention, Incurable Optimist is a special case.

* Trainer: The title almost always goes to trainers who have barns filled with top-class horses and rack up statistics than impress voters. Bob Baffert will surely be a worthy recipient after developing the probable 3-year-old champ, Real Quiet, and the 2-year-old filly champ, Silverbulletday, plus many other major stakes winners. Yet no member of the profession accomplished feats more amazing in 1998 than Michael Dickinson, who transformed Cetewayo from a $13,000 claiming horse into a Grade I winner, and brought back Da Hoss from a two-year layoff to win the Breeders’ Cup Mile.

* Jockey: The title will go to one of the big guns, Gary Stevens or Jerry Bailey, who win the stakes races with seven-figure purses, but nobody rides much better, day-in day-out, than Maryland’s Edgar Prado, who has won more than 1,000 races over the last two years. He’s a consistent, tireless, admirable competitor and, like Skip Away, deserves to be honored for those virtues.