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Originally Posted by Bold Brooklynite
Sorry, Hoss ... you must have missed the posts on this thread where I proposed the solution ... that is ...
... that the Eclipse Sprint Award should have been vacated ... that is ... no champion named.
There are years when that's the best solution ... and I argued for it all last Fall. The champion in any division should be a horse who raced well over a substantial portion of the year ... AND ... who somehow demonstrated a reasonably clear superiority to his rivals.
There wasn't an American sprinter last year ... who deserved to carry the glorious word "champion" for all eternity.
Giving it to a horse who may not have even been in the top 10 ... debased the whole meaning of the Eclipse Award.
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I think that's pretty silly. It's probably less than 50% of the time that there is a clear and obvious winner who demonstrated reasonably clear superiority over their rivals. If we adopted your idea, we would have no winner in half the divisions every year.
Your contention that LITF was not in the Top 10 is absurd. He finished 7th in the BC Sprint. How is not in the Top 10 if he finished 7th in the championship race. If hed terrible Form before the race and finished 7th, you could argue that he wasn't in the Top 10. However, he had great Form going in and was the #1 seed going in. He went off as the odds-on 3-5 favorite that day. Let's say that the fans made a huge mistake in their handicapping and he should have been 5-1 instead of 3-5. That would still put him in at least the Top 7 best sprinters(since he finished 7th) and probably the Top 4 or 5 based on his previous Form. You can't tell me that LITF should have been 40-1 that day. I see fans make mistakes all the time, but I've never seen a horse who should be 40-1 go off at 3-5. If they made mistakes that big you could make millions betting the horses.