The title of American Champion Older Male Horse is an American Thoroughbred horse racing honor awarded annually to a stallion or gelding, four years old and up. In 1971, it became part of the Eclipse Awards program.
The award originated in 1936 when the Daily Racing Form (DRF) began naming an annual champion. In the same year, the Baltimore-based Turf and Sports Digest magazine instituted a similar award. Starting in 1950, the Thoroughbred Racing Associations (TRA) began naming its own champion. The following list provides the name of the horses chosen by these organizations. Whenever there were different champions named, the horses are listed side-by-side with the one chosen as champion by the Daily Racing Form noted with the letters (DRF), the one chosen by the Thoroughbred Racing Associations by the letters (TRA) and the one chosen by Turf and Sports Digest by the letters (TSD). Prior to 1971 this award was referred to as "Champion Handicap Male Horse". The Daily Racing Form version was open to any horse, three years old and up and this award was given to some Champions at the age of three, such as Citation, Buckpasser, Damascus and Arts and Letters.
The Daily Racing Form, the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, and the National Turf Writers Association all joined forces in 1971 to create the Eclipse Award.
Champions prior to 1936 were selected retrospectively by a panel of experts as published by The Blood-Horse magazine.
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“In Africa I had indeed found a sufficiently frightful kind of loneliness but the isolation of this American ant heap was even more shattering.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“What a terrible thing has happened to us all! To you there, to us here, to all everywhere. Peace who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed as he walked by her very side. Her gallant boy is dead. What a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder! We mourn here with you, poor, sad American people.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“The older we become, the more certain our future.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The world’s male chivalry has perished out,
But women are knights-errant to the last;
And, if Cervantes had been greater still,
He had made his Don a Donna.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“A good horse will never return to graze on grass it has already passed by.”
—Chinese proverb.