If the choice of Able Friend's next assignment was a horse race, then the indications yesterday were that Dubai will win that almost as easily as the giant gelding annexed the HK$10 million Stewards' Cup.
It was almost a case of jockey Joao Moreira, trainer John Moore and owner Dr Cornel Li Fook-kwan all trying to keep a straight face and suppress their joy, knowing that, if it was this easy, it must be illegal.
The facts were simple. Able Friend sat last, unsuited by a slow tempo and a sprint home that might have challenged a lesser animal and rounded them up at his leisure.
Moreira again had no need to release the brakes at any stage on Able Friend, and debate moved to learned argument about whether this incredibly easy win was incredibly easier than the last one or not.
"I would say the way he won the international race was easier - it's hard to say which was easiest but today was a very facile win," Moreira said. "It's hard to say how much more there is. I don't have to hit him."
But the bigger debate has been all about where the show goes next.
Moore has always favoured Dubai and it's an easy 10-day stopover, as opposed to Sydney and a six-week custodial sentence for quarantine purposes.
Dr Li had not been of the same mind, concerned that some horses return from Dubai flattened and never the same again, and had floated the prospect of the Doncaster Mile in Sydney.
But the two men were closer to humming in tune yesterday even before Moore forecast he would sit Dr Li down for lunch "in the next 10 days" and they would work out the final arrangement - at least as far as Sydney was concerned.
"No Dubai, no Sydney. The Doncaster is a handicap so we don't know how much weight he will get and if he had to do the quarantine in Melbourne to race in Sydney? That's just a no-no," Dr Li said when asked.
Moore's task now is to convince the owner that, if Sydney is the wrong option, then Dubai is the right one.
"We'll have lunch and toss up the merits of six weeks in Sydney for A$3 million or a 10-day turnaround in Dubai for US$6.5 million," Moore said. "I don't agree with the idea horses don't come back from Dubai. There has been the odd one but I've had horses come back from there and win.
"Viva Pataca came back. Sunny King battled to win races most of his career but he came back from Dubai and won a Group One, I think it was his first start afterwards. And if we don't go to Dubai, I'm not sure what we have to run in between the Queen's Silver Jubilee in March and the Champions Mile in May."
Moore said the Queen Anne Stakes at Royal Ascot is an option for later in the season and officials from the Japan Racing Association were quickly on hand after yesterday's race to lobby Moore for the Yasuda Kinen in June.
"But those are things to think about much later - there's a lot to happen between now and June and I think the Dubai Duty Free [now the Dubai Turf] is where we should look to first," the trainer said.
There were other runners in the Stewards' Cup, with Beauty Flame and the winner's stablemate Rewarding Hero making their first forays into Group One company count with second and third, and perhaps signalling a change of the guards. Or at least those guards stuck in the colossal shadow of a champion.
Gold-Fun was heavily backed to beat Able Friend and disappointed, and past champion milers Glorious Days and Ambitious Dragon were showing that past is probably the key word in that description.
