LOS ANGELES, December 15, 2009--We may have to call it the No Name Decade, because to date neither the wordsmiths nor the historians have been able to pigeonhole 2000-2009. The previous decades were easy--the Nineties, the Eighties and so on, but the 10 years just past have escaped hard definition. Slate took a hearty swing, but 2000-2009 came in low and outside, and all the online magazine could manage was "the Aughts," which is like hitting a foul popup to the catcher. Shamelessly bouncing off Slate, the New York Times floated "the Aughties," which doesn't roll off the tongue, either. On its cover, New York magazine resorted to "the 00's." We've got to keep trying, we've got a few days left in 2009. Whatever they might eventually be labeled, the years 2000-2009 will be most remembered for the following by horse racing, which as usual was going through the best and worst of times:

10. Seabiscuit, in print and on the screen. Laura Hillenbrand overcame chronic fatigue syndrome to write a 2001 bestseller, then two years later the film about the legendary horse would earn seven Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. The movie didn't make jockey-turned-actor Gary Stevens a star, but following Spencer Tracy's advice ("know your lines and don't bump into the furniture") he had a nice turn as George Woolf. The movie didn't save racing, but that was a silly idea to begin with, and at least it must have been the impetus for future films about Ruffian, Secretariat and Julie Krone.

9. Frank Stronach's folly. When he bought Santa Anita in December of 1998, the Canadian industrialist thought that the California landmark would be a cornerstone for a racing empire. But by 2009 the Stronach-led Magna Entertainment Corp. had accumulated about a billion dollars in liabilities, and was shopping a roster of other tracks in what was hardly a seller's market. Magna's tracks were still operating, some just barely, while a bankruptcy judge in Delaware tried to figure out how to throw Stronach a lifeline.

8. Mandella four-bagger. Richard Mandella was voted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2001. As though that distinction needed validation, the California-based trainer set a Breeders' Cup record in 2003 at Santa Anita by winning four races (in the good old days, when they only ran eight). Halfbridled (Juvenile Fillies), Action This Day (Juvenile) and Johar (who dead-heated for first in the Turf) preceded an unexpected win by another Mandella charge, the 14-1 Pleasantly Perfect, in the Classic.

7. Thanks for the memories. Chris McCarron, who had ridden Tiznow to back-to-back wins in the Breeders' Cup Classic in 2000-01, retired in 2002, and before the decade was over, so did a passel of other preeminent jockeys. Others who rode off into the sunset were Eddie Delahoussaye, Laffit Pincay, Julie Krone, Craig Perret, Gary Stevens, Pat Day and Jerry Bailey. As a group, they won 50,758 races.

6. Julie Krone steps up. One of the photos of the decade is a from-the-rear shot of the 4-foot-10 Julie Krone, standing on a wooden crate so she could see over the podium as she made her induction speech at the Racing Hall of Fame in 2000. Krone, who won 3,704 races, became the first woman to be enshrined. At the end of the decade, Janet Elliot, a steeplechase trainer, became the second woman to be voted in.

5. The pick six fix. Volponi's $89 win in the 2002 Breeders' Cup Classic at Arlington Park led investigators to three former fraternity brothers at Drexel University, who were able to buy tickets on the pick six after the first four legs had been run. A freeze was placed on the payoffs, which would have exceeded $3 million, and Chris Harn, a programmer at Autotote, and his two accomplices all did jail time. Seven years later, however, questions still linger in the minds of some bettors about the integrity of the overall tote system.

4. Belmont blahs. The decade failed to cure the hunger for the first Triple Crown champion since Affirmed in 1978. In 2002, War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, then stumbled leaving the gate and finished eighth in the Belmont. The next year, another tease as Funny Cide pocketed the first two races before running third in the Belmont. In 2004, Smarty Jones missed the sweep when he was second in New York. Big Brown's unsuccessful Triple Crown bid in 2008 was the strangest of them all: At 30 cents on the dollar, he was pulled up by his jockey, Kent Desormeaux, with more than a quarter mile to run.

3. Those Louisville longshots. Even though the only four winning favorites in the Kentucky Derby since 1980 all came in this decade, the race was jolted by a run of inscrutable longshots. War Emblem, bought by his owner less than three weeks before the race, was 20-1. Funny Cide, at 12-1, was the first gelding to win in 74 years. In 2005, Giacomo paid $102.60, second-highest ever. In 2009, Mine That Bird paid even more, $103.20.

2. The synthetic track explosion. It came voluntarily at tracks like Turfway Park and Keeneland, but not in California. The California Horse Racing Board, cringing over the rise in horse fatalities at Del Mar, painted its entire industry with the same brush and virtually sent dirt tracks to a museum. Hollywood Park began running races over a surface called Cushion Track in the fall of 2006. With various incarnations, Del Mar and Santa Anita followed suit, and in Northern California, so did Golden Gate Fields. The only dirt exception among the state's major tracks was Bay Meadows, which went out of business in 2008. These artificial surfaces were no problem for the Breeders' Cup, which broke with tradition and ran back-to-back events at Santa Anita in 2008-09. European horses by and large thrived at Santa Anita, but there was a schism among local horsemen who trained and raced over the synthetics on a regular basis, and some confused handicappers were loath to bet West Coast races. By the end of the decade, the racing board had opened the door for a return to dirt, but no track seemed to be in a spending mood to do so.

1. Rachel Alexandra vs. Zenyatta. After the deaths of Barbaro and Eight Belles, following their injuries in the 2006 Preakness and the 2008 Derby, there was a Congressional hearing into racing, and the sport was in dire need of an antidote. In that regard, the arrival of the brilliant fillies Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra couldn't have been better timed. Zenyatta raced for three years, climaxing an undefeated career with a scintillating victory, her 14th, in the 2009 Breeders' Cup Classic. Rachel Alexandra, a 3-year-old, went undefeated in 2009, beating males in the Preakness, the Haskell and the Woodward. When a face-to-face battle between the pair never materialized (Jess Jackson, Rachel Alexandra's principal owner, abhorred synthetics, and Zenyatta ran all but one of her races over them), Horse of the Year voters were left with the Delphic task of choosing one over the other.