NZ Broodmare of the Year
NZ Broodmare of the Year
The Broodmare of the Year Award has been presented since 1969, which makes it the oldest continuously awarded honour in New Zealand standardbred breeding. Where the Excellence award weighs a lifetime, this one weighs a season. It goes to the mare whose progeny, over a single racing year, best declared her worth as a producer. Fifty seven seasons on, the list has become something close to a record of the breed itself.
The early roll reads like a foundation document. Colwyn Bay, foaled in 1947 and by Josedale Dictator, took the first award. Behind her came mares by U Scott, Light Brigade, Captain Adios, Lumber Dream, Garrison Hanover and Scottish Command, the stallions on which the New Zealand studbook was built. Nancy Lee, honoured in 1976, was foaled in 1949. These were mares whose best work was done in an era before speed figures and sales averages, and the award is often the only formal recognition they ever received.
Because it turns on a season rather than a career, a mare can win it more than once, and the ones who do tend to be the ones who mattered most. Deft took it in 1974 and 1975 at sixteen and seventeen years of age. Desilu went back to back in 1980 and 1981, Interchange in 2004 and 2005, Bethany in 2017 and 2018, and Imaginary Bet in 2024 and 2025. Sheezadoosie won in 2010 and again in 2012, and Scuse Me in 2013 and again in 2015. A repeat winner is a mare producing at the top for a decade or more, not a mare having one good year.
Read down the family column and the same lines keep surfacing. The U305 family of Nora by Glencoe has supplied Scuse Me, Splendid Dreams and Imaginary Bet. N10, Regina, produced Black Watch in 1990, Aberfeldy in 2001 and Vicario in 2011. U30, Dairy Maid, delivered winners across three separate decades. N41, Lady Clare, spans from Miranda Belle in 1988 to Lively Nights in 2022. These are not coincidences. They are the families that hold, and this award is the clearest evidence we have of which ones do.
The generational chains are the best of it. Ten To One was named Trotting Broodmare of the Year in 2018, and four years later the award went to her own daughter Habibti. Scuse Me won in 2013 and 2015, and in 2016 the pacing award went to her daughter Splendid Dreams. Nakura and Maureens Dream and Dreamy Atom, all later honoured with the Excellence award, appear on this list in the dam column beside their own daughters. The mares hand it on, and the honour roll records the handover.
Some of these mares went on to shape the sport well beyond our borders. Splendid Dreams, the 2016 pacing winner and later a Broodmare of Excellence recipient, produced the double millionaire Christen Me and the Group One winning filly Dream About Me from just fourteen foals. Imaginary Bet is the dam of Merlin and Captains Mistress, and her yearlings now carry her title into the sale ring as a selling point in their own right. The award has become part of the currency of the catalogue page.
From 2016 the award has been presented in two divisions, pacing and trotting, and the single combined title was retired. It was the right call. A trotting matron works with a smaller pool of mares and stallions and a longer road to the races, and her season should be measured against her own kind rather than against pacing numbers. Since the split, both divisions have found winners every year.
Fifty seven seasons, and not one of these mares knew she had won anything. They are on this list because of what they left behind, and because someone was paying attention.
NZ Broodmare of the Year | Honour Roll
New Zealand Broodmare of the Year
| Year | Broodmare | DoB | Family | Sire | Dam |
|---|
