Last night I enjoyed a glamorous evening at our annual Champion Awards ceremony at the Grand Hyatt where the season's best were duly recognized for their accomplishments.
The centre of attention went to Werther as this Derby winner joined some past champions such as Designs On Rome and Ambitious Dragon in taking the most coveted Horse of the Year title, along with the Champion Middle-Distance honours, at the end of his four-year-old campaign. It also marked four consecutive seasons where the Horse of the Year was the same as our racing fans' Most Popular Horse. With his terrific efforts in the BMW Hong Kong Derby and Audemars Piguet Queen Elizabeth II Cup, I believe many fans will be eager to see him improve further in the coming season. My many congratulations to all of our very deserving winners!
Coming on Sunday, we will present several more awards in front of our loyal fans. Kei Chiong scored an important winner with Moment Of Power in the midweek Happy Valley race meeting, as that victory helped her to re-establish a three-win cushion from Derek Leung in the race for the inaugural Tony Cruz Award before entering the season finale meeting at Sha Tin tomorrow. Both Kei and Derek have 10 mounts for the day and I will be closely following their battle.
Of course, we will also award the Most Popular Jockey title, which, at the last update of the voting, was a heated race between our champion rider Joao Moreira and the Tony Cruz Award leader in Kei. It will be a very fun and festive afternoon at Sha Tin and I hope you all come to join us after the races to meet and show your appreciation to all jockeys in our parade on turf. See you there!
The last race of the season is traditionally the Hong Kong Racehorse Owners Association Trophy which is run as a Class 2 race over 1400m and generates usually the highest turnover per race of the season. I would not be surprised that this will be the case this year too because this race is likely the most competitive race run in Hong Kong this season with many on form horses.
The pace of the race is expected to be good to fast which will give horses coming from off the pace a good chance to use their finishing speed while the race run on the B+2 track helps horses being well positioned more in the front of the field and horses from the back have to be ridden for luck and hope for a gap or coming wide. Spicy Sure, Caga Force and Borntoachieve should all go forward with Harriet Jet, Apollo's Choice and So Fast not far behind. Hammer King can race handy too.
To select a winner is not easy with Apollo's Choice, Spicy Sure, Merion, Invincible Dragon, Winston's Lad and Pikachu all having good chances. In the end I like Invincible Dragon most especially as the extra 200m should help him being a winner over 1600m in a Listed Race in France. Spicy Sure is my next choice with Merion being followed by Winston's Lad and Pikachu.
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