When David Ferraris greeted Weichong Marwing on Sweet Orange as the final winner of the 2010-11 season last July after the Hong Kong Racehorse Owners Association Cup, he was looking to the colt as the silver lining on a black cloud of a season.
So there was a sense of deja vu as the South African trainer welcomed in the same horse and rider after an upset in the Mercedes-Benz Classic Mile fostered hopes that Sweet Orange could rescue this season, too, after the yard claimed its first Sha Tin turf win of the term and its sixth win in all.
'You can get so despondent here at times - I really needed this,' said a relieved Ferraris after a nail-biting finish to the first of the Group One four-year-old classics.
'The horses have not been running badly but have just not quite been getting there. I've had 17 seconds and probably half of them were nose finishes - if a few of them had won I'd been thinking things were going well, but it's hard to explain that to owners.
'And the stampede of horses from your yard in Hong Kong when things aren't going as well as everyone would like, well, it makes the wildebeests charging across the Serengetti look tame. I've never seen a place like Hong Kong where a single win like this can just lift you up, so I hope this is the turning point.'
Since the start of this season, Sweet Orange had been dogged by bad luck at the barrier draw, so there was a certain irony in his having drawn inside this time and still had to 'do it ugly' to outrun favourite Fay Fay by a neck after sitting posted wide without cover.
'I couldn't believe it. In the run, I just put my head in my hands and couldn't believe it was happening,' Ferraris said.
