American jockeys, like all their country’s sportsmen, appear to come ready-equipped with the sound bite. Pulling up 500kilos of pounding horseflesh can be a job in itself without the elation of just having won the biggest race of your career for the second time, but Mike Smith was already prepared.

Smith had just won the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Zenyatta and was returning to the winner’s enclosure at Santa Anita. It was a moment when a thousand emotions could have been vying for room in his mind yet, when a mounted interviewer asked if the mare should now be acclaimed Horse of the Year, without missing a beat he replied: “No. She’s Horse of the Decade.”

Case closed? Not a bit of it. In fact this is virtual horseracing at its best – or worst – depending on your point of view.  On Monday evening the great and the good of American racing will gather in the plush surroundings of one of the finest hotels in Beverly Hills (ok, do they have any other kind in that part of town?) for the 39th Eclipse Awards dinner.

Now some sports’ awards claim to be their version of Hollywood’s Oscars, but this is a lot closer than most.  The Horse of the Year dates back to 1887 and, as its name implies, goes to the horse, irrespective of age, whose performance is deemed the most outstanding.

Official voting for the honour only began in 1936 when the Daily Racing Form newspaper began choosing a Horse of the Year. In 1950 the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America inaugurated its own Horse of the Year award, which led to there being co-champions in 1949, 1952, 1957, 1965, and 1970. In 1971, the DRF and TRA got together with the National Turf Writers Association and created one set of awards called the Eclipse Awards.

The title has tended to be male dominated but that hegemony will be broken for only the second time in over 20 years (since Azeri in 2002) this year, because the award has become a showdown between the two queens of the track, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra. And that is where the virtual reality part comes into play.

The two dominated the season and went through their campaigns unbeaten, partly because they never met.  Having proved themselves against their own sex, both then proceeded to put the colts in their place. Rachel Alexandra did so when she beat Macho Again by a head in the Grade One Woodward Stakes at Saratoga in September, and Zenyatta came with her customary late run to beat Gio Ponti in the Classic, thus becoming the first filly or mare to win the race in its history.

It was a performance that more than matched anything that Rachel Alexandra had achieved (Zenyatta’s connections had eschewed the comparative “gimme” of a repeat in the Ladies Classic at the Breeders’ Cup), as evidenced by the fact that Zenyatta was rated 1lb superior to Rachel Alexandra in the World Thoroughbred Rankings for 2009. But what America really wanted to see was a racecourse match between the pair.

The Classic had been the most obvious meeting point even though a west-coast venue would have ceded home advantage to Zenyatta over the east-coast trained Rachel Alexandra. However, it was not geography that was the grounds for Rachel Alexnadra’s absence but the surface itself. Santa Anita had replaced the traditional dirt course with something called Pro-ride  - a non-wax synthetic surface, made predominately from sand, polymeric binder and a cushioning agent. It has been hailed as a success and there have been far few injuries at the two Breeders’ Cup meetings run on it than many of the previous ones run on dirt.

However, Rachel Alexandra’s owner, Jess Jackson, was having none of it. “I’ve seen horses run on plastic – they struggle over it,” he once said. “I think plastic favours turf horses.

“I just don’t want to risk Rachel Alexandra. You may not think it’s a risk, but I saw what Curlin did and how he struggled and I saw four or five other horses that race on plastic and they struggled. If it’s a dirt horse, it’s a dirt horse.”

The reference to Curlin (Jackson’s Horse of the Year for the previous two years) came from his defeat by Raven’s Pass in the 2008 Classic. Then Jackson had been in favour of participating in what has been America’s gradual acceptance of various surfaces other than dirt, which are regarded as less stressful to horses in terms of injury.  This time around he decided to withdraw to the homelands of dirt, with this year’s Breeders’ Cup at Churchill Downs as the long-term objective for Rachel Alexandra.    

With Zenyatta now retired, despite regular morning work-outs, the only objective method of measurement between the two horses comes via the ballot box.

Early indicators may go against Rachael Alexandra, with Jackson failing to make the final nominations for the owner’s award, and there may be an element of East-West divide but the final split may be between those who favour change and those who wish to hide from it.

Either way, expect it to be close.

Paul Wheeler