There were two aspects of his arrival at the Hong Kong Jockey Club that were of concern to the institution's German chief executive, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges.
'I arrived on April 1, 1998, which seemed a very inauspicious day, so I made sure not to turn up to the Jockey Club offices until April 2,' the club's supremo recalls as he prepares to survey the towering post-handover climb made by Hong Kong's favourite and most famous pastime.
Engelbrecht-Bresges, a leading administrator of the German industry when the club came courting him for the position of racing director in the second half of 1997, had a simple question for then chairman Alan Li Fook-sum.
'I said, 'Why should I come?' Hong Kong was well known all over the world for huge betting on horse racing, but racing as a sport was, how can I say it ... at development level,' he says.
'You must have world-class racing and that starts with the horses and then everything else. And Alan, who was a lover of great racing, embraced this and knew it would be a five-year, 10-year project. If you look at racing and globalisation, there will be five or six places which dominate and we both felt that if Hong Kong, with all its resources, did not take up this strategy, it would always remain a development-level city.'
The handover coincided - give or take a fortnight - with the end of the 1996-97 racing season when betting turnover tipped over HK$92 billion. It was the highest in the club's history and remains so, as turnover proved to be the second, and more vexing, of Engelbrecht-Bresges' concerns: the irony of Hong Kong's world-famous turnover crashing while the club advanced in every other respect.
