Hi all, right now I'm about to board my flight in Dublin, so as to be back in Hong Kong in time to attend our race meeting at Sha Tin tomorrow. As you may have read in my previous blog entry, I came here to attend an international symposium hosted by the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders' Association. It's been great to have the chance to gather with so many overseas racing colleagues during the past two days and to share our experiences.
I gave a speech yesterday about international racing in the 21st century, as part of a panel session discussing trends in thoroughbred racing and breeding. I put forward the idea that it may well be the time for major racing jurisdictions to review the possibility of co-ordinating all the existing international racing series, like the Global Sprint Challenge and Asian Mile Challenge, into a world super-series of turf racing at the sprint, mile, middle and classic distances, based on the calendar year
I think this practice could avoid races in different racing series from getting too fragmented. With internationally co-ordinated race planning in place, it could also resolve the problem of conflicting dates and imbalances in the racing calendar, which in the past has forced a number of quality racehorses to sacrifice the opportunity of contesting important races held on similar dates to others.
I would love to see all racing representatives raise and discuss their views on this global approach, so as to counteract the severe competition posed by other sports, and help make racing a sport that attracts more worldwide recognition.
Although my presentation was only concerned with realigning world racing series over different distances, I'm always mindful that we also need to review our domestic racing products from time to time. Recently we've received some interesting comments from our racing fans about the race distances in our Triple Crown series, so we will certainly bear this in mind.
Tomorrow, Sha Tin will host the first leg of our Champion Sprint Series, the Centenary Sprint Cup, as part of the new Jebsen Cup Race Day. Sacred Kingdom – the world's highest-rated sprinter – will have his first run since his stunning victory in the Cathay Pacific Hong Kong Sprint seven weeks ago. Just like some of other star international race performers such as Good Ba Ba, Floral Pegasus and Viva Pataca, who all delivered strong next-up performances in last week's Citi Stewards' Cup, I'm sure that many of you are waiting eagerly to see Sacred Kingdom make another breathtaking run tomorrow.
Though I've been in Ireland for the past few days, I've still been making some studies of our 10 races tomorrow. I will be keeping a close eye on the performance of He Can Tango (Race 9) and Congratulation (Race 10) as both horses won last time on the same course and respective distance at 1,400 metres.
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