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Labour of love

Murray Bell

The 'Lucky Owners dream' will receive its first market test at Australia's Gold Coast next month when 13 members of his initial crop of southern-hemisphere-bred babies go up for auction.

Lucky Owners, winner of the 2003 Hong Kong Mile and the 2004 Derby, is giving a large number of the SAR's racing enthusiasts a first-time ride into the strange but exciting new world of thoroughbred breeding.

Racing fans simply don't get any more excited and committed than Leung Kai-fai, a successful local businessman with offices in Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui.

Leung's love of Lucky Owners and his unflinching belief in the horse has seen him create a mini-industry around the dual Group One winner who, among his other credentials, is a son of the late, great champion Danehill.

'People in Hong Kong have not done this before,' Leung says. 'This is the first time a Hong Kong-trained horse has gone off to stud and been supported by Hong Kong people to this extent.

'Many Jockey Club members have become involved Lucky Owners' new career as a stallion. My dream is to see Lucky Owners' sons and daughters eventually coming to Hong Kong and winning big races, just like their father did.'

Peter Yip Hak-yung, founder of the Hong Kong Breeders Club, is an example of the enthusiasm that has followed Lucky Owners.

'We have sent mares to Lucky Owners in England and in Australia as well,' says Yip. 'He is a Hong Kong horse and we want to support our own. It will be a truly great thing for Hong Kong if Lucky Owners is a successful sire, and we hope we can be a small part of that success with Mr Leung.'

Having a former Hong Kong racehorse suddenly becoming a stallion worth more than $60 million is a new experience for everyone in this racing-crazy town. And the enthusiasm is catching.

For most of its century-plus existence, racing here has been about gambling and little else. In the beginning, the 'horses' were little more than China ponies, Mongolian ponies and some cross-bred horses doing battle in the annual Chinese New Year races at Happy Valley.

They were eventually replaced by some of the cheapest rejects from other thoroughbred racing centres. The racing steadily became more frequent and the gambling just got bigger. It was all amateur, though, with little thought given to the residual value of the competing animals.

Then came Hong Kong's professional era, beginning in 1973. The construction and opening of Sha Tin took place five years later and by the late 1980s, the first international races were taking place.

When the late Jockey Club chairman Alan Li Fook-sum and his executive director of racing, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, decided to really crank up the international agenda in 1998, the wheels were really set in motion.

Suddenly, Hong Kong horses were competing on the international stage, initially at home and then, in 2000, Fairy King Prawn won the Yasuda Kinen in Tokyo - the first overseas Group One victory by a Hong Kong-trained horse. Fairy King Prawn, like Lucky Owners, is a son of Danehill.

Lucky Owners claimed his own piece of history with his Group One double in 2003-04, under the care of trainer Tony Cruz and jockey Felix Coetzee. His deeds on the racetrack set him up for a lucrative stud career. Suddenly, big-name stud farms from all over the globe were calling, frantically bidding to make this world-class miler their future sire.

Lucky Owners serves the southern hemisphere spring (September to December) at Widden Stud, New South Wales - the oldest family-owned thoroughbred stud farm in the world, which has been owned by the Thompson family for more than 130 years.

Around Christmas time, he has his passport stamped and flies to England where he plies his trade at Sandley Stud, returning to Australia again in early August. Such is the life of the jet-setting, thoroughbred romeo in the 21st century - more than 100 girlfriends in each country if everything goes to plan.

Lucky Owners is proving himself quite a performer, too.

Of the 114 mares he served in his initial season at Widden, 95 conceived - a very acceptable fertility rate of 83.3 per cent for a first-season sire.

In his second year Down Under, Lucky Owners really had a handle on the game, and put away 87 of his 95 mares - an exceptional conception rate of 91.6 per cent. Remember, artificial insemination is not allowed in the thoroughbred industry - it's 100 per cent natural.

The foals are meeting with rave reviews. For example, after the British owners saw the foals from his first, disappointingly small northern hemisphere crop of 26, his second-season booking increased by more than 100 per cent.

But for all the talk and the marketing hype, there are only two real tests of a thoroughbred - the sales ring and the racecourse - and the first of these takes place at next month's Magic Millions National Weanling and Broodmare Sale.

'We have 13 weanlings by Lucky Owners at the sale,' said Leung's bloodstock manager, Jovy Chan Siu-yuk. 'It's a very important time because we're hopeful that all these first foals go to good homes. But this is just the first stage; next January the yearling sales begin. And then, in 2007-08, his first two-year-olds will begin racing.'

Anyone like to bet on there being some speedy two-year-olds by Lucky Owners competing in the griffin races here in 2008? You'd like to be as sure of winning the Mark Six.

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