Old firm of Lee and Mosse eye Sprint title
Almond Lee Yee-tat has been to the Cathay Pacific Hong Kong Sprint before, in his previous life as assistant to David Hayes, who lifted the world's richest 1,000 metres race with All Thrills Too in 2002.
This time, in his sophomore season as a trainer in his own right, Lee will be there on Sunday attempting to do it all again with with a revitalized Planer Ruler. It's the old firm of Lee and Gerald Mosse, minus the repatriated 'Hayesy'.
Coinciding with the departure through illness of champion Silent Witness, Planet Ruler has found a level of speed that most thought he'd outgrown. He busted the brilliant Able Prince in the International Sprint Trial last month and promises to do it again in the big race on Sunday.
Lee has been walking the fine line this week between painstaking preparation and common sense.
'I keep telling my boys - a horse is a horse, and training is training,' Lee said. 'The horse has got to do the normal things. If you get too concerned, thinking this is a big race and you try to give him extra, that never helps.'
His apprenticeship to Hayes, a master of big races, has been invaluable in the countdown to Sunday's feature, which promises to be a home-town showdown between Planet Ruler and the Cape Crusader, perhaps better known as Cape of Good Hope.
'I have known Planet Ruler since the first day he came to Hayesy, I know him very well,' Lee said. 'To win the Hong Kong Sprint Trial, we did a few things differently with him and they worked. I had him very fresh and I asked Gerald to ride him a bit more aggressively than we'd been doing previously.
'It worked, and he won the race. He felt that race, however, and lost some weight afterwards, but has not put it all back on. He's done some nice work this week, but I've been concentrating on keeping him fresh and sharp - after all, the race is only 1,000 metres.'
Planet Ruler has drawn perfectly in barrier one on Sunday - the same stall from which he won the Sprint Trial. And what's more the race should work out identically for him, with Mosse being able to follow the former Macau speedball Natural Blitz.
And one more thing: the International Sprint Trial has been run in its current form for just three years and each of the winners - All Thrills Too (2002) and Silent Witness (2004, 2005) - have gone on to complete the double three weeks later.
