On raw numbers, Chad Brown should win his fifth Eclipse Award as champion trainer in North America. The numbers are awesome.
Brown won 211 races from 925 starters during 2024, the seventh-highest win total among North American trainers. Steve Asmussen led North American with 407 winners but required 2,288 starters to get them. Yet Brown’s seventh-highest win total still yielded the highest earnings among North American trainers, $30.87 million, about $1.5 million more than Asmussen in second. Graded stakes victories? Not close. Brown’s 47 were 14 more than the next-best number, Brad Cox’s 33. Brown won four more Grade 1s, 15, than Bob Baffert, whose 11 such tallies ranked second.
Within these totals, take note of this extraordinary accomplishment: Among Brown’s 211 winners throughout the year, 47 came in graded stakes races, meaning more than one out of every five races Brown won came in graded competition. Now that is a powerhouse stable.
A dozen different horses produced those 15 Grade 1 wins, and will anyone waste their breath calling Brown a “turf trainer,” a moniker stuck to him much of his career? Seven of the Grade 1s came on turf, eight on dirt. Among all his graded stakes wins, 29 came in grass races, 17 on dirt. Brown has a single Eclipse finalist, Carl Spackler, in a turf category but has four on dirt: the 2-year-old Chancer McPatrick, 3-year-old Sierra Leone, female sprinter Ways and Means, and older dirt female Raging Sea.
:: Full list of 2024 Eclipse Awards finalists, including profile stories
For all that, you have to imagine Brown rues a big one that got away. Sierra Leone, a likely Horse of the Year finalist, had “Kentucky Derby winner” written all over him as the calendar flipped to February, then March and April. Sierra Leone won the Grade 2 Risen Star making his 3-year-old debut, dominated the Toyota Blue Grass Stakes for his first Grade 1, and had the right attitude and stamina to give Brown his first Kentucky Derby. Instead, Sierra Leone’s habit of lugging in through the homestretch undid him at Churchill Downs.
The colt appeared to plateau through the summer, running good races, not winning, but all along, Brown had his eye on the Longines Breeders’ Cup Classic. Brown trained Sierra Leone into the race from the Grade 1 DraftKings Travers Stakes on Aug. 24. Sierra Leone got the pace he needed. Brown had corrected the colt’s wandering habits. Brown won his first Breeders’ Cup Classic. And, if the numbers tell the tale, his fifth Eclipse.
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