Most who have clawed to the top end of the jockeys' championship can recall a turning point. A lucky break that won them the support of a powerful stable, or getting on the right horse at the right time - but it's too simple to say Blazing Speed is that horse for Neil Callan.
Today at Sha Tin, Callan is aiming for a second straight win in the Group One Standard Chartered Champions & Chater Cup on Blazing Speed, which would cap a year in which the Irishman has won twice more at the top level and established himself in the jockeys' championship top five.
"There's been no single moment, just persistence and getting back up again when I've been knocked down," he says. "I arrived here and I didn't know anybody, and it has been just a case of sticking at it. It certainly hasn't been handed to me. Oh, and I hate losing at anything."
A disastrous result - and what Callan did next - perhaps best illustrates the 36-year-old's determination. In the third race of a wet February meeting at Sha Tin, Callan was riding Reborn To Win when it fell heavily, sending the jockey sliding across the slippery track, only just missing the metal uprights that hold the rail.
Reborn To Win was euthanised, and although Callan didn't suffer a major injury, he fell hard, and was within his rights to call it a day. Instead, with grass stains on his pants, he took his place for the next race, drawing applause from rival jockeys and raucous cheers from the spectators.
"It was quite touching in a way," he says. "I mean, [the Sha Tin regulars] aren't a very sentimental lot, are they? They are just punters, so when I got that reaction it meant a lot."
Callan had already earned the nickname "Ironman" from the Chinese press, and got another chance to live up to it when another accident on April 12 later left him with a severely strained arch in his right foot and damaged ankle ligaments. After 10 days out, icing his swollen foot between races and unable to walk without limping, he won the Group One Audemars Piguet QE II Cup on Blazing Speed.
Callan grew up one of three brothers in a County Kildare housing estate a stone's throw from The Curragh, Ireland's spiritual home of racing. His father had a short stint as an apprentice, but it wasn't as if racing was in his blood. He still became obsessed.
"When I was a kid I would tape whatever races where on television that day, like when Royal Ascot was on, when I got home from school I would watch the races over and over again," he says. "That's when I wanted to become a jockey - watching guys like Pat Eddery, Mick Kinane, and a young Frankie Dettori.
"I loved horses, I basically taught myself to ride. I had a friend who worked at a pony club, he lied and said I knew how to ride and we would race the ponies. I fell off that many times that I learned how to stay on."
The first two and a half years of his apprenticeship didn't amount to much and he went away to train as a carpenter for a while. A six-month working holiday riding trackwork in England saw trainer Karl Burke convince him to resume and he got near the top of the junior ranks.
Though a top-five rider in England with six Group One winners upon arrival for his first short-term contract at Sha Tin in 2011, he didn't have the "big name" status of some who have failed to break through here.
There are plenty of critics who claim that European riders struggle to adapt in Hong Kong and if Callan holds on to his top-five spot, it will be the first time in more than a decade that a British or Irish jockey has done so - the last John Egan, fourth with 51 wins in 2000-01.
"I think there's some truth to it," Callan says of the criticisms. "European racing is a lot more relaxed and there's not as much emphasis on getting the horses out of the gates as there is here."
In the last three seasons, Callan has grafted from five, 12 and nine winners during short stints, to 33 last term, when he declared he would ride full-time, to his current total of 39; the higher-profile Colm O'Donoghue, Tom Queally and Andrea Atzeni came and went with seven winners between them from 232 rides.
"Maybe they don't stay long enough to adapt though, they usually come for three months and if you don't do something in the first month here you can end up not getting support," Callan says.
"And maybe the only difference with me was that I persevered and stuck it out. One thing about here is that you can't have any sense of entitlement. I came here and treated it like I was just coming out of my time as an apprentice, I had to prove myself all over again."
Now firmly established with wife Trish and young boys Jack, Henry and Ted, he isn't in a hurry to give up what he has fought so hard for. "I love the lifestyle here, racing twice a week and getting so much time with my family. The boys are in school, so I'll be here for a while yet I hope."
