Local champions star at Hong Kong International Races

Umbrellas are up but not because of the forecast rain which fails to materialise during the afternoon. Instead, they’re for protection from a hot sun which has been beating down on Sha Tin for the last few days. According to the guidebook, December is supposed to be one of Hong Kong’s cooler months, with an average temperature of 17 degrees, but today it’s nearer 25 – certainly the poor soul roasting in a horse costume as the track’s mascot drew the short straw. But it’s pleasantly cooler at the back of the stand where the spectacular parade ring with its arching roof offers protection from the sun and a cooling breeze blows through its open sides.

Favourite backers have got off to a good start as short-priced winners have taken the first two handicaps. As the runners parade for the third, a wave of cheers, shouts and applause accompanies one of the horses around the paddock. The adulation, though, is not for Capital Delight but for his jockey Joao Moreira. It was on this day twelve months ago that the Brazilian said an emotional goodbye to Hong Kong at a farewell ceremony before racing, but his return from Japan for the day is clearly warmly welcomed by the legion of fans he made whilst becoming the local four-time champion.

Moreira is out of luck on Capital Delight but there are high hopes for his mount Lebensstil in the Vase who starts a short-priced favourite to follow up his Group 2 success under the same jockey in Japan last time. But Lebensstil isn’t involved in the finish, characterising a disappointing day all round for the thirteen-strong Japanese contingent who draw a blank at the meeting for the first time since 2018.

Junko another French winner in the Vase

Instead, it’s the Marseillaise which the Hong Kong Police Band are belting out at the on-course trophy presentation afterwards following Junko’s win for Andre Fabre under Maxime Guyon in a steadily-run race. The same trainer-jockey combination won the race with Flintshire in 2014, while Fabre was winning the Vase for a third time in all, a race which French-trained horses have now won eleven times, more than any other nation. Fabre thus joins Aidan O’Brien as the race’s most successful trainer, with O’Brien’s runner this time, Warm Heart, finishing third after being the first to go for home in the straight but having no answer to the slow-starting Junko’s challenge from the rear inside the final furlong.

Highfield Princess out of luck in the Sprint

Britain’s sole runner at the meeting – which is one more than last year – is next up, with Highfield Princess going for John Quinn, Jason Hart and owner John Fairley and his family in the Hong Kong Sprint. It’s a good start, with the mare – whose colours of red with a yellow star, it only now becomes very obvious, bear a striking resemblance to the Chinese flag - winning the best turned out award, and she handles the preliminaries well too, but in the race itself she’s too free in the early stages and finishes sixth, adding her name to a long list of top European sprinters over the years who have come up short in this contest.

Instead, in a repeat of last year, the Sprint along with the Mile and Cup, all go to Hong Kong horses. The successful trio aren’t just locally-trained, each of them is established as champion in their respective divisions, but they’ve each arrived here after very different campaigns. Sprint winner Lucky Sweynesse, for example, has been kept busy all year by his trainer Manfred Man, this being his tenth run of 2023 and his eighth win. A model of consistency, Lucky Sweynesse’s sixth place in last year’s Hong Kong Sprint when he didn’t get much luck in running is the only occasion that he’s been out of the first three and he wins well under champion jockey Zac Purton, turning the tables on last year’s winner Wellington back in third.

A belated third Mile for Golden Sixty

But the real star of the afternoon, and without a doubt the most popular winner of all on the day, is Golden Sixty in the Hong Kong Mile. His widely anticipated third successive win the contest never happened last year – he went down by a neck to California Spangle – so this was his chance both to put the record straight and to equal the record of three wins in the race set by Good Ba Ba between 2007 and 2009.

But there were two potentially complicating factors this year. One was an absence of 224 days stretching back to his win in the Champions Mile at the end of April where the next three home, including California Spangle, are among his opponents again here. Retirement plans are already in place in Japan for the Australian-bred eight-year-old, so his races are being carefully chosen by trainer Francis Lui at this late stage of his career, hence his lack of a run beforehand.

At Thursday’s draw ceremony, Golden Sixty was handed stall 14, the widest of all, which drew gasps from those present. The Mile has been won from the outside stall before though – Beauty Flash managed it in 2010 – and, as it turned out, there was no cause for alarm after all. With all the confidence of someone who has been successful 25 times from 29 rides on him, Golden Sixty’s jockey Vincent Ho, fresh from becoming Hong Kong’s first homegrown jockey to win the International Jockeys’ Championship at Happy Valley days earlier, soon has Golden Sixty where he wants him, dropping his mount into a mid-pack position not long after the start.

Once in line for home, Golden Sixty unleashes his usual turn of foot, which had seemingly deserted him twelve months earlier, belying his advancing years as he leaves his younger rivals for dead and running out the most impressive winner of the four International Races. As the reception for Moreira had shown earlier in the afternoon, Hong Kong’s racing fans are not shy about showing an appreciation of their heroes – human and equine – which goes well beyond any financial gain at stake, and Golden Sixty’s tenth Group 1 victory at Sha Tin is greeted with a rapturous reception by the crowd of more than 65,000.

Appreciating that this is due to be Golden Sixty’s final appearance at this particular meeting, his jockey takes him on a long victory parade back down the straight the full length of the stands so it was a good ten minutes after the race that they finally return to the winners’ enclosure. As a result of the extended celebrations, the normally clockwork timekeeping of the Hong Kong Jockey Club has to be adjusted slightly but in the circumstances there can be few complaints at the announcement that the remaining three races on the card would all be run five minutes later than advertised.

Whatever happens in the remaining six months or so of the current Hong Kong season, a record fourth Horse of The Year title is surely in the bag for Golden Sixty.

Romantic Warrior battles to retain his Cup title

After such a memorable performance from Golden Sixty, you had to feel a bit sorry for Romantic Warrior who had the toughest of acts to follow as the defending champion in the card’s richest race, the Hong Kong Cup. But the Danny Shum-trained gelding had rather stolen the limelight from Golden Sixty twelve months earlier when he’d been such an impressive winner of the Cup and you couldn’t blame the Sha Tin crowd for making him a hot favourite to retain his title, especially as he’d gained a famous victory overseas in the Cox Plate in Australia six weeks beforehand.

But this promised to be a much more competitive race than the betting implied, with Romantic Warrior having very little in hand over both Ireland’s Luxembourg and Japan’s leading contender Prognosis on Timeform ratings. So it proved, with the first five home covered by about a length in the most thrilling finish of the four big races. It was clear from early on that nobody would be breaking the two-minute barrier as Romantic Warrior had done in a fast-run race last year, the steadier tempo this year looking to inconvenience French challenger Horizon Dore most of all as he pulled far too hard.

Once things get serious in the straight, Romantic Warrior initially has too much pace for all his rivals, most notably Luxembourg who was off the bridle to keep tabs on the favourite even before they’d turned for home, but Ryan Moore gets a game response from his partner who closes all the way to line to force a photo finish with Romantic Warrior who is all out to hold on under James McDonald. There’s just a short head between the pair, with Luxembourg shaping as though the Vase would be the race for him if he’s back here in twelve months’ time, while the same distance away in third is Japan’s 2021 runner-up Hishi Iguazu. Prognosis isn’t seen to best effect from the rear but stays on for a close-up fifth.

A dozen strikes were administered to Romantic Warrior in rapid succession in the closing stages, while Luxembourg too came in for a harder race than would have been tolerated in Europe these days, but neither jockey involved in the finish fell foul of the local whip rules. While he had to give best to his New Zealand-born rival on this occasion, Moore had succeeded McDonald as recipient of the World’s Best Jockey Award at the Longines Hong Kong International Races Gala Dinner on Friday night, though how much of the meal Moore had been able to enjoy is less certain given he had to do just 8-5 to ride Warm Heart in the Vase.

Hong Kong has had some top horses over the years at a variety of distances but whether it’s had three such dominant champions as Lucky Sweynesse, Golden Sixty and Romantic Warrior all around at the same time must be doubted. Between them, this trio have now raced 68 times for 53 wins, with their earnings totalling more than HK$356 million or more than £36 million. ‘When the world’s greatest meet’ is the tagline for Hong Kong’s end-of-year turf championships. But Sha Tin isn’t just a meeting place for some of the world’s best horses from elsewhere; it was again very evident from Sunday’s racing that it’s also very much home to some of them too.

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