Jay Privman, the former national correspondent for Daily Racing Form, has been named the recipient of the Eclipse Award for Feature/Commentary Writing for a retrospective on the life of the late D. Wayne Lukas that appeared in the newspaper last summer, the organizers of the Eclipse Awards announced on Thursday.
Privman, who retired in 2022 but wrote the Lukas retrospective due to his close working relationship with the Hall of Fame trainer over the past 40 years, was named along with five other Eclipse Media award winners.
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◗ In the other writing award, for News/Enterprise, Natalie Voss won for a four-part series appearing in The Paulick Report late in 2024 titled “Doom Scroll: Thoroughbreds, Bail Pens, and Horse Traders.”
◗ For Photography, Skip
Dickstein won for an image of rider Irad Ortiz Jr. being unseated from his mount at the start of the Aug. 31 Jockey Club Gold Cup, which appeared in the Albany Times-Union and The Blood-Horse.
◗ In Live Television Programming, Fox Sports won for its broadcast of the Belmont Stakes on June 7.
◗ In Feature Television, Fox Sports was also the winner, for a piece called “Healing Ride” examining the impact on the family of Bill Mott and his son Riley after the loss of Riley’s daughter, Megan, to brain cancer, at the age of 2.
◗ In Multi-Media, Augusta Chapman and Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics Radio won for a piece called “The Horse is Us: Inside the Horse-Industrial Complex,” which aired on Nov. 7, 2025.
Privman’s piece on Lukas, called “Lukas Morphed From Caustic to Avuncular,” was the first work by Privman to win an Eclipse Award for writing despite a 42-year career covering the sport. Privman was given a Special Eclipse for Career Excellence in 2023.
“Wayne Lukas was a significantly impactful figure in the sport, yet his story arc was largely unknown by those who weren’t around when he first came on the scene,” said Privman. “Having covered him for more than 40 years, I was fortunate to have the perspective of that arc, and the good fortune that my old employer, Daily Racing Form, was desirous of running a piece that showcased the totality of Wayne’s saga.”
Voss, the winner of the Eclipse for News/Enterprise, was a longtime reporter and editor at The Paulick Report before taking a job in early 2025 as the director of communications for the United States Equestrian Foundation. The Eclipse for the bail pen series is her fourth Eclipse Award for writing.
“I’m so honored to win the Eclipse for this series because this subject is incredibly important to me,” said Voss. “I did a lot of reporting that intersected with the bail pen economy in my career and was always a little surprised when I’d encounter racing stakeholders who didn’t know much about it.”
Dickstein won his second Eclipse for Photography with the Ortiz image. He first won in 1996 for a photo of the finish of the Breeders’ Cup Classic that year at Woodbine Racecourse in Toronto.
“It was one of the best action images I’ve ever made,” said Dickstein, who has been a professional photographer for 45 years. “I have won [the Eclipse Award] before from a remote, but never a handheld image. This brings a greater sense of satisfaction as the hand-held image is far more personal.”
Fox Sports has been ramping up its coverage of Thoroughbred racing for the past decade and first broadcast the Belmont Stakes in 2023. Its Belmont Stakes coverage for the 2025 race, featuring a rematch between rivals Sovereignty and Journalism, was its first Eclipse for Live Programming.
The winner for Feature Programming appeared during Fox’s five-hour Belmont Stakes broadcast on June 7. The piece, narrated by Tom Rinaldi, was a heart-breaking window into the emotional strain placed on the Mott family due to Margot Mott’s diagnosis and death.
Fox Sports also won an Eclipse for Television Feature in 2019 for a piece on Rachel Alexandra, the 2009 Horse of the Year.
The Freakonomics Radio podcast that won the Multimedia Eclipse was the middle part of a three-part series examining the history of the horse in the U.S. In the winning episode, the podcast focused on various facets of the Thoroughbred industry. It first aired on Oc. 31.
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