NZ Horse of the Year Awards

NZ Horse of the Year Awards

This is the complete record of New Zealand's harness racing awards, 945 titles awarded across 57 seasons from 1969 to the present, held in one place for the first time. 540 individual horses appear on it. Some are here once, for a single season when everything came together. A handful are here six, seven and eight times over.

The Harness Horse of the Year is the supreme award and the oldest of them, first presented in 1969. It sits above the gait divisions and always has, which is why it appears here on its own rather than filed under pacing. Ten trotters have taken it, from No Response in 1979 and Sir Castleton in a shared 1984 award, through Merinai, Lyell Creek, Take A Moment, I Can Doosit and Monbet, to Sundees Son back to back in 2021 and 2022 and Just Believe in 2024. On the right night, the trotters beat the lot of them.

Beneath it the awards divide by gait and then by age and sex, pacers from 1969 and trotters from 1974, running from the two year olds through to the aged horses. That structure is what makes the roll worth reading closely. A great horse leaves a trail down through it. Sundees Son and Il Vicolo and Chokin each hold eight titles, Lazarus and Elsu seven, and Monbet, Terror To Love, I Can Doosit, Monkey King and Auckland Reactor six apiece. Those runs start in the juvenile ranks and finish in open company, and you can watch each one build season by season.

Read the sire column and you are reading the shape of the breed. Bettors Delight has sired 76 award winners, Sundon 60 on the trotting side, and behind them Vance Hanover, Game Pride, Majestic Son, Christian Cullen, Chiola Hanover and In The Pocket. The families tell the same story with a longer memory. N1, Pride of Lincoln, has produced 52 award winners on its own. U30, Dairy Maid, has 30. N8, Hoods Polly, U303, Brown Lancet, N26, Violet M and N10, Regina are all beyond twenty. These are the families that keep turning up, decade after decade, under different names and different sires.

The gaps matter too, and they have been kept rather than tidied away. Some seasons no award was made. The four and five year old divisions were dropped entirely between 2013 and 2015 before being reinstated. A 1984 title was shared. The roll is a record of how the sport has judged itself, and that has changed over 57 years.

Season earnings and mile rate shown against each winner are for the award season only, not the horse's career. They are the figures the award was made on.

NZ Horse of the Year Awards | Honour Roll

Choose a gait. Supreme shows the Harness Horse of the Year, open to pacers and trotters alike. Pacing and Trotting each carry their own full set of age and sex divisions.

Switch between two ways of reading it. By award groups the winners under each category, most recent first, which is how you follow one title back through the years. By season flips it around and shows every award made in a single year together, which is the whole awards night on one screen.

Narrow to a category. The chips beneath the controls filter to a single division, from the two year olds up to the aged horses. They change to match whichever gait you have selected.

Search anything. The search box looks across horse names, sires, dam sires and families all at once, ignoring whichever filters you have set. Search a stallion to see every award winner he has sired. Search a family number to trace it through the decades.

Click a horse to open their record. A panel slides in with their foaling year, sex, family, sire and dam sire, and then every award they have ever won, listed by season with the earnings and mark for each. This is the quickest way to see the full shape of a career.

On a phone each entry becomes its own labelled card, so everything works the same way on a small screen.