LOCAL TRAINERS SHUT OUT THE EXPATS IN THE HKIR

By Darren Winningham | Sunday, December 10, 2023

The LONGINES Hong Kong International Races (HKIR) has been run and won for 2023.

What is striking about the results on the LONGINES HKIR day at Sha Tin is that not one expat-based trainer in Hong Kong managed to win a race. In fact, the only winner on the entire program who was not trained by a local Hong Kong Chinese trainer was Junko, trained by the French trainer Andre Fabre who saluted in the LONGINES Hong Kong Vase (Group 1).

I would think this is unprecedented.

I wrote earlier in the week about the emerging dominance of the local Hong Kong Chinese trainers. I was looking into a crystal ball thinking that the local trainers were dominating in the early part of the new season and speculating on where that early dominance might lead.

The 2023 HKIR went a long way towards answering that question.

Pierre Ng Pang-chi, who is leading the 2023 trainer’s premiership had a winner at Happy Valley and then backed it up with a winning double at Sha Tin.

Francis Lui had a winner at each meeting and then Danny Shum topped it all with a double at Happy Valley and again at Sha Tin on Sunday where he won the featured LONGINES Hong Kong Cup (Group 1) with Romantic Warrior.

The breakdown of the nine wins out of ten races for the local Hong Kong Chinese trainers shows that Danny Shum, Ricky Yiu, Pierre Ng, Manfred Man all trained winning doubles on Hong Kong’s premier race day while Francis Lui took out the LONGINES Hong Kong Mile with Golden Sixty.

Make no mistake, this represents and seemingly cements a gigantic shift in the Hong Kong racing training ranks.

The emergence of local trainers, stemming from the long-term investment that has been made by the Hong Kong Jockey Club emphasising the ‘local’ in the local industry, is succeeding and paying handsome dividends.

There is no better proof of that than what we witnessed on the international stage at the LONGINES HKIR day 2023!

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