Broodmare of Excellence
NZSBA Broodmare of Excellence
The Broodmare of Excellence Award is the highest honour the New Zealand Standardbred Breeders Association confers on a mare. It is not a seasonal title and it is not settled by one good year. It recognises a lifetime of production: the whole of what a mare left behind her, and what those foals and their daughters have since come to mean to the New Zealand studbook.
That distinction is the point of the award. Broodmare of the Year turns on a season, on the horses in work and the races they won. Excellence turns on a career, and usually on a career that is finished or close to it. The citations read accordingly. A winner is assessed on foals bred, foals raced, winners produced, the speed tiers those winners reached, the black type they collected here and abroad, and the producing daughters who have carried the line on. Splendid Dreams, honoured in 2021, was assessed on fourteen foals for ten raced and nine winners in two minutes, three in 1:55, two in 1:52 and one in 1:50, headed by the double millionaire Christen Me and with her progeny having left the winners of well over a hundred races across three countries.
What the mare did on the track counts for very little. Corporate Banner, the 2017 winner, never made it to the races at all, and was bred almost by accident after her breeder borrowed her dam from his father, before producing Mainland Banner in her first turn at stud. Splendid Dreams retired with under $11,000 to her name. The award measures what a mare gave the breed, not what she won for herself, and that is why it sits apart from every other trophy handed out in the code.
It is also, quietly, an award for a family. Almost every recipient is a mare who anchors or renews one, which is why the classic family number is carried alongside her name in the honour roll. The influence keeps declaring itself long after the mare is gone. Maureens Dream, honoured in 2012, was still being cited in yearling sale catalogues more than a decade later as the great granddam of drafts coming through the ring. A mare enters this list once and her descendants trade on it for generations.
Because the honour is awarded on a completed record rather than a season's results, it is also an award for the breeder. Behind every recipient sit decades of mating decisions, of returning to a mare when the market said otherwise, and of holding daughters back rather than selling them. Chiolas Lass, the 2021 trotting winner, produced fifteen foals under the one breeding partnership, every one of them bred by the same small group of people. The award is announced each year at the Breeders' function on the eve of the New Zealand Cup at Addington, and it is the breeder who walks up to collect it.
From 2019 the award has been presented in two divisions, pacing and trotting. The change acknowledged what breeders already knew, that trotting production in this country is a different craft worked with a smaller pool of mares and stallions, and that a trotting matron's record should be weighed on its own terms rather than against pacing numbers. Nor is the honour automatic. Where no record demands it, a season passes without an award, as happened in the pacing division in 2024. That restraint is what keeps the list worth being on.
NZBSA Broodmare of Excellence | Honour Roll
New Zealand Broodmare of Excellence
| Year | Broodmare | DoB | Family | Sire | Dam |
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