On Mothers' Day last Sunday, I attended a special carnival in Tin Shui Wai co-hosted by the Club and Yuen Long District Council, and I must say I found it a real pleasure to spend such a meaningful afternoon with mothers and families in that area. About 100 members from our CARE@hkjc employee volunteer team and Jockey Club staff, as well as volunteers of 29 non-governmental organisations in the district, joined together to provide a range of family games and activities, which in total attracted more than 5,000 local people.
During the event, Club Chairman John Chan and I presented carnations, a traditional Mothers' Day flower, to some of the mothers. It was great to see the smile on their faces, as well as to watch their children having lots of fun with the various programmes we arranged for them. This event was one of a number of activities we have undertaken recently to show our care and support for the Tin Shui Wai community, and I was truly pleased to have the chance of participating.
I would guess that many of you have been just as busy in the past few days, giving your own mothers and families a special treat on Mothers' Day, as well as preparing for our race meetings on Monday and tonight. In fact, the reason we have not arranged a race meeting on Mothers' Day in recent seasons is that we want to give racing fans more time to be with their families on this special occasion.
I know that some of you might also wonder why we chose to schedule a race meeting for tonight, just two days after the previous one, as a replacement for the meeting we had to call off on 20 April. Well, I can tell you that we did actually consider holding this meeting on Thursday, 15 May, but it turned out to be unfeasible as some of the boxes and other venues at Happy Valley Racecourse had already been reserved for private functions such as wedding banquets, and I would not see it as reasonable to cancel these prior bookings at short notice. Furthermore, we expected that arranging a Thursday meeting would lead to more consultative processes with the Government, particularly the Transport Department and Police, which might further delay the approval process for this race meeting.
I do realise that the resulting arrangement may create an even busier week for many of our racing fans and media friends, but I hope you will understand our rationale and the constraints we are facing. Anyway, we have eight races on our card tonight, and I will be looking out for good performances from Trulli and Double Luck – which both ran nicely in their last appearances at Happy Valley. Jockey Brett Prebble should know the form of these two up-and-coming runners very well as he's the one galloping both horses at morning trackwork, and I'll be interested to see how they perform with Prebble on board tonight.
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