Hong Kong's champion four-year-old of last season, Lucky Owners, has begun his new career in the right way at the Widden Stud in Australia's Hunter Valley.
Many a talented racehorse has been packed off to stud only to be found wanting in the key area of potency. There is no better example than the sensational Australian racehorse, Mouawad, who was retired prematurely from the racetrack for the sake of his breeding career and subsequently found to be all but infertile. It was a slippery slope which saw him banished with rude haste to the wilds of mainland China's breeding barns when he was still of an age when he might have been racing.
But Hong Kong racing fans need not fear the same fate for Lucky Owners, who is right up there with the best of them at his new caper and holding plenty of attention as the first Hong Kong horse to be given his chance at a major stud farm anywhere.
The highest stakes-winning son of champion stallion Danehill is doing exactly what he is supposed to and Widden announced this week that 89 per cent of the mares Lucky Owners has met have returned positive pregnancy tests. By industry standards, strike rates in the breeding barn just don't get any better than that.
The first three of owner Leung Kai-fai's mares which have been bred to Lucky Owners so far have tested positive to the Hong Kong Derby winner, who has proved popular with 115 bookings.
Amongst the mares bred to Lucky Owners are the dam of Group One sprinter and now stallion, General Nediym, and also a close relation of Silent Witness.