The stars come out to play
The Audemars Piguet Queen ElizabethII Cup is the race in which the famous Jim And Tonic ran the fastest 2,000 metres in Hong Kong racing history. The Champions Mile gave us one of the most famous moments in sport in 2005, when the unbeaten world champion Silent Witness was nosed out in the last bound to end a 17-race winning streak - triumph and heartbreak separated by a mere stride.
Tomorrow at the world-class Sha Tin racecourse, the Hong Kong Jockey Club will present the 2008 renewal of both these great races in a springtime celebration of all that is great about horse racing in Asia's World City.
Some see racing as gambling, and with the club likely to achieve betting turnover on horse racing of about HK$70billion this season, it is clearly big business. But racing is also a high-class sport, and few jurisdictions anywhere on the planet showcase it as well as Hong Kong.
Tomorrow the stars come out to play. Just last weekend, jockeys Glen Boss and Darren Beadman won races worth more than HK$50million in Sydney, but they will find more depth to tomorrow's competition. Douglas Whyte, Brett Prebble, Felix Coetzee, Gerald Mosse, Howard Cheng Yue-tin - the Hong Kong jockey ranks have punching power all the way down.
The assembly of horse flesh will indeed be worthy. Matsurida Gogh won the biggest race in Japan, the Arima Kinen in December, and he will oppose our own Viva Pataca, who was a nose off a clean-sweep of the six top staying races in Hong Kong over the past 12 months. Helene Mascot, hero of the 'Derby of the Decade' last month, will have an army of support, with the C-team - Tony Cruz and Felix Coetzee - supreme in the popularity stakes. In the Champions Mile, Good Ba Ba seems set to make a whitewash of the big miles for the season and, after three successive Group One's, are there any doubters left?
World-ranked thoroughbreds, handled by some of the best jockeys worldwide, in unyielding competition on one of the world's great racecourses.
And it's all available in Hong Kong, at Sha Tin tomorrow.
