Category: Eclipse Awards

Bill Oppenheim: Into Mischief Tops the Charts

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For the year-end tables of leading sires in various categories of APEX ratings, which measure the frequency that stallions sire runners who meet certain earnings percentage thresholds, sires have to have had 200 or more year-starters going back as far as seven seasons (a horse is counted as one ‘year-starter’ each year it races, as with the average earnings index). The top category is ‘A Runners’, which measures the top 2% of earners in each jurisdiction each year.

On Jan. 14, 2016, we published the leading sires by A Runner Index for the years 2009-15 (Thoroughbred Daily News, Jan. 14, 2016). The top three sires were Galileo (4.09 A Runner Index), Into Mischief (4.07), and War Front  (3.89).

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2YO Eclipse Contender, Storm The Court, Demonstrates the Value of his Sire, Court Vision

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Championship Shot Brings Vision Back in Focus

Storm the Court | Eclipse Sportswire

By Chris McGrath

There’s been some pretty faint praise for the winner of what generally proves the key race to determine the best 2-year-old colt of his crop. So much so, that plenty of Eclipse voters were plainly hoping that Tiz The Law (Constitution) could pull the championship rug from under the feet of Storm The Court (Court Vision), shock winner of the GI Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, when odds-on for the GII Kentucky Jockey Club S. last Saturday.

In the event, Tiz The Law succumbed to the same stage fright that unravelled more fancied horses when Storm the Court emulated his sire, 64-1 winner of the Mile in 2011, as a hear-a-pin-drop Breeders’ Cup winner. His defeat presumably restores Storm the Court to pole position, though the turf winners at the Breeders’ Cup may yet enter the equation. But whoever ultimately gains the laurels, it must be pretty irritating for connections of Storm the Court to hear his success treated as an aberration, sooner credited to inconsistencies in track and opposition than to his own merit.

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