While unbeaten Hong Kong Sprint winner Silent Witness is undoubtedly Hong Kong's horse of the moment, he still has a bit of work ahead of him before he can topple Fairy King Prawn as the greatest Hong Kong horse of modern times.
Fairy King Prawn (pictured) won the Hong Kong Sprint in 1999 when trained by Ricky Yiu Poon-fie and later finished second, to the freakish New Zealand mare Sunline, in the Hong Kong Mile (when trained by Ivan Allan).
It was Allan who took the Danehill gelding overseas to represent Hong Kong, bringing home the spoils of victory from the Group One Yasuda Kinen (1,600m) in Tokyo on June, 2000.
It was an unprecedented day of pride for Hong Kong and remains our only international Group One success away from Sha Tin.
The Sunline-Fairy King Prawn encounter in the 2000 HK Mile is one of the most fabled battles of the turf, and is warmly remembered in both hemispheres as an event that, in effect, defined world-class thoroughbred racing.
The Jockey Club's executive director of racing, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, still talks of his 'unforgettable memories' of that race, when front-running Sunline broke all other rivals with her sustained top-level speed, but then had to call on all her reserves of courage to hold out the astonishing finishing burst of The Prawn.