Let me first offer my apologies to all those affected by the service disruption of our eWin system during last Sunday's Sha Tin race meeting. I can understand that this will have caused a degree of inconvenience to some of you. We at the Club place a lot of importance on providing reliable, top-quality services to our customers, so we are always very concerned when problems occur.
It has always been our target to make regular improvement work on our online betting services, and our team actually intended to upgrade the current version before Euro 2008. We have undertaken several major changes in the past, including the modifications during the commencement of football betting and the introduction of the new bet slip user interface during the 2006/07 season, and have not experienced any serious problems on these occasions.
But I can promise you that we have immediately started an investigation into this matter. To avoid any further risks, our team has already decided to roll back and restore the original eWin version for our race meeting tonight.
As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I spent part of last week in Dalian following the Club's donation of a number of retired racehorses to the Dalian Mounted Police. Being a great football fan, I also looked on the city's football club, Dalian Haicheng, which has probably been the most successful team to date in the Chinese professional era. I was able to visit their football academy and was very impressed by their training facilities, set-up and talent scouting system.
In the past the club has produced a number of players who have gone on to play with top European clubs, including Sun Jihai at Manchester City and Dong Fangzhou at Manchester United. A club official told me they have also recently sent several apprentice players to Singapore to receive further football training. This is a visionary move and will surely help these players improve their skills and techniques.
In fact, though, it is exactly the approach our Club has taken in recent years to help our young trainees and apprentices enhance their skills by gaining overseas riding and training experience. It's good to see that two of our current crop of overseas trainees – Derek Yeung and Keith Leung who have been riding and performing very well in Australia and New Zealand respectively – have now earned licences to ride as apprentices in Hong Kong next season.
It is also pleasing to note that the nomination list for Most Popular Jockey of the Year that we announced last Sunday includes three local riders that came up through the Club's own "academy", namely Howard Cheng, Alex Lai and Marco Chui. They have all performed extremely well this season and thoroughly deserve their place alongside the expatriate nominees.
The Most Popular Jockey and Most Popular Horse of the Year voting campaigns are important annual contests that give our racing fans to acknowledge the hard work, diligence and achievements of these outstanding performers during the season. Your participation not only reflects your appreciation of these top jockeys and horses, but also demonstrates your support for our racing industry. I hope you will all take the opportunity to cast your votes in the coming two weeks.
I'm sure our jockeys will be trying their hardest to earn a few more of your votes in tonight's meeting at Happy Valley – a replacement race night for the one we cancelled on 21 May in mourning for the victims of the Sichuan earthquakes.
I will be looking forward to seeing the performances of Keen Soul and United Efforts tonight. Despite taking a six-month layoff, Keen Soul gave a nice run and finished second in his previous appearance at Happy Valley in April. This time he will be partnered by Douglas Whyte and running in a five-furlong race again. I'd love to see if he can improve further tonight. For United Efforts, though blood abnormality forced this Happy Valley Vase contender to withdraw from his previous declared run last month, his previous win at the same distance in April was remarkable and I'm interested to see if he can repeat that success tonight.
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