When you talk about strong trainer-jockey associations, the couplings of Cruz-Coetzee, Moore-Soumillon, Size-Whyte and Yip cum Saint-Martin spring to mind. But there is another team in town with a strike-rate that puts them all in the pale.
When trainer Manfred Man Ka-leung joins forces with champion jockey Douglas Whyte - as he will do in four races tonight - get set for some fireworks.
Whyte and Man have combined for a total of 11 races this season, and have come away with five winners, two seconds and a third. That's a win strike rate of 45.5 per cent and a place rate of almost 73 per cent. Whyte takes over on A Better Dragon in the second race and then pilots Danehill gelding Healthy Fruits in the fourth, coinciding with the six-year-old's drop into Class Four. Note that Man has also ordered the gelding should carry blinkers again.
Healthy Fruits has had two runs this season for a first-up third to Fifty Fifty over 1,200 metres in Class Three company on September 8, and then an eighth behind the flying machine Billet Express over the 1,000 metres course here on December 4 when ridden by apprentice Paul Lo Pak-hin.
In the fifth event, a Class Four over 1,650 metres, Whyte will handle Lok Wah Success for the Man stable. Interestingly Lok Wah Success is bred on an identical cross to Healthy Fruits, being by Danehill from a daughter of 1989 Epsom Derby hero Nashwan.
Lok Wah Success has had only two runs for Man and looks ready to salute in the wake of his good second to Lucky Dice over this course and distance on December 4. And in the final event, Man and Whyte will get together again with Successive Gains, one of the major fancies for the Class Two event over 1,650 metres.
