WHEN THE ODD COUPLE WOULD GO HORSE RACING…
- Hans Ebert
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Having never had to write to deadlines except when a copywriter in advertising, and these days having to meet the demands of publishers while at the same time needing the therapy of writing poetry and songs and observations on life, trying to keep track of the ins and outs of horse racing is a tricky one to fit in.
There’s so much to say, but without naming names, and realising that everything needing to be said probably already has been said, or that no one cares, time spent writing could be an exercise in futility.
Having said all this, last Wednesday night while watching some of the racing from Happy Valley on television and seeing former champion Hong Kong jockey Gary Moore, who, these days is looking more and more like a plump little dumpling, hug and kiss Zac Purton on the cheek helped jog the old memory bank.
“Gazza” is an interesting character with an equally interesting pedigree and history, and known for his love for playing to the peanut gallery, his antics at least gave that flaccid looking Countdown To 2000 winners by Zac-someone who deserves more than this type of cheese fondue- a break from what’s become rather boring HKJC tradition.
This bit of lame duck nonsense also managed to bring back a tsunami of racing memories and a flotilla of random thought bubbles.
Like what? Just to keep it as a vague laundry list that probably needs to be decoded, there would be Cosmo Chan, the Michael Bastion nosedive from the sixth floor of Estoril Court, former champion British polo player James Neal and his Hong Kong connection to “Ice Ice Baby”, the adventures of the Boys from Brazil, and, these days, the emergence of AI into horse racing that a new generation will probably inherit.
With the entire world seemingly buying into AI despite anyone truly understanding how and where and when this “artificial intelligence” works best, how it will work in a game of chance like horse racing might be fairly interesting to follow as some of us have already been offered “Trial VIP AI tips”.
Personally speaking, far more interesting is what’s being termed “boutique racing” which combines travel, exotic locations with EDM and DJs and where just one of the activities offered being horse racing for those who wouldn’t know the difference between Ryan Moore and Roger Moore and don’t care. Some refer to this destination and travel and tourism focused new multi layered product as “the new Ibiza”.
There’s a growing appetite and a new and more adventurous global market for the KISS theory of Keeping It Simple, Stupid with zero time nor interest for things like monstrous looking giant totalisator boards, which are well on their way to becoming another relic from the past.
For racing clubs and the governments who tolerate horse racing because of their dependence on taxes from wagering to fund housing and community driven projects, well, the times they are-a-changing and expect radical changes to the overall landscape of a game already on shaky ground in a down economy.
With the Musky one apparently approached to take over what was the LIV golf franchise after the Yassir Al-Rumayyan governed Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) suddenly went poof and pulled PIF out of financing the sport after having taken a US$6 billion dollar hit for doing so, nothing would surprise us.
As we look at the state of the world today and how us global citizens appear to have nothing to say about our futures and those of our kids because so much is in the hands of autocrats and who they have in their deep pockets, let’s get back to happier times and those weirdly offbeat horse racing days of yore…
After attending the Melbourne Spring Carnival for the first time and discovering that our big noting acquaintance involved with horse racing from Australia who my friend Norman (Cheng) and I had wined and dined and showed him several six star Hong Kong nights out on our dime couldn’t even get us a table for the Caulfield Cup, we returned for a couple of years mainly for those karaoke soaked nights at Fidel’s in Crown where ladies from Gotham City would descend upon the upmarket cigar bar at around 11pm.
Before this ritual, we would take in the Mahogany Room or stand at the bar at Saxophone and see which jockeys would be hovering around bigly Melbourne Cup winning horse owner Lloyd Williams and happy to kiss his ring.
By that time, Norman Cheng and I were two music industry executives who had done well for ourselves, knew the entertainment industry inside out and sideways and were trying to understand where the world of horse racing was headed. Those we met and who were very much part of the game seemed perfectly happy with the way things were.
Thirty years later, their thinking hasn’t changed even though the Earth is almost another planet.
Thanks to bloodstock agents looking for new business, we were invited to clubs in London like Aspinall’s and became regulars at the popular bar down Cadogan Place where on any given day one could meet Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, Frankie Dettori, boxer Lennox Lewis and actor Russell Crowe having a pint together.
Though Norman owned and raced horses in Europe, California, including a few champions in Macau, he raced some rather slow ones in Hong Kong including the expensive flop who raced in WA as Who Dat Singa.
The last horse he owned in Hong Kong was the multi million dollar purchase “Dinosaur Boy”. Bought at the Hong Kong Jockey Club International Sales, the galloper ran three times, came last at each start and was finally retired last year after going lame, but not before Norman had spent over $10 million racing the galloper. This was when he made his decision to exit horse racing feeling he had been burnt.
Horse racing can be a very cruel game at the best of times and I am fortunate to have given up the dangers of “chasing” and invested just $75,000 Patacas when purchasing the smallest horse racing in Macau at the time. It was trained by Charles Leck and recommended to me by Colin Dean, below, who, at the time, was the champion jockey in Macau, er, and didn’t wear lipstick.
After Charles Leck returned to Singapore, the galloper went on to be trained by George Williams, George Moore and Peter Leyshan, and somehow managed to win at least eleven races before being retired as a nine year old to somewhere in China. No one told me where in China.
Knowing what I now know about what some of these equine retirements to China apparently faced, this was a good thing.
Racing anything in Macau eventually became a dodgy pursuit- don’t ever mention the Macau canidrome-though during those early days, going horse racing in the former Portuguese enclave was always something fun and not unlike a mix of “The Hangover”, “Jurassic Park” and the “Rush Hour” franchise.
All this is mentioned not because of missing what some quaintly describe as “the good old days”, and which they might have been, but if truth be known, those days and nights only happened to those who had “the coin” to attract the bees to the honeypot.
Those in Hong Kong lamenting the lack of “class” when going to the races these days, well, they are correct. But this lack of “class” is prevalent throughout the world and a city, where there’s not much of even a pulse running through its veins, let alone finding that elusive “class” at the races.
The one-time SRO- Standing Room Only-Champagne Bar, for example, has been hijacked by the species known as “influencers” and the Selfie Generation busy taking photos of their lunches or dinners for posting on Instagram and where, apparently, the young and “cool people” go.
Really? There are “cool” people?
Do these “cool people” bother going racing? No- and why not? Because, maybe perception is everything and just like how Instagram apparently represents whatever and whoever is “trending”, horse racing appears much more skewed towards old school Facebook.
Facebook is apparently where the older people go disguised as “digital creators” and “entrepreneurs” when most can probably be put into the “retired and unemployed” basket.
Going horse racing as some of us knew it has gone forever as is the world and the Hong Kong that had three of the best escort clubs in the world, the fun nitery known as JJ’s at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, discos like Canton, Hot Gossip, Manhattan, and a club like Planet Hollywood that opened with a bang, but failed to go the distance.
What Hong Kong always did have were bloody interesting characters who not even a Hollywood screenwriter could have imagined- and pretty much all having some tenuous link to horse racing in order to keep up pretences.
It wasn’t that far removed from a popular television commercial at the time for Hennessy cognac set to a brassy version of “Hey, Big Spender” and selling “aspiration”.
Sure, there were those who tried too hard to be seen as being what they weren’t and Hong Kong seemed to attract and accept them all, because there was so much of everything to go around. Plus, listening and watching the finely choreographed moves and carefully curated selling of themselves by serial grifters was fairly entertaining.
For instance, Hong Kong probably had more overnight “celebrity chefs” per capita and plenty of movers and shakers who were open to being anything one wanted them to be, because they had absolutely nothing going for them.
This was before pretty much everything started their downhill descent and those on budgets had to settle for night outs at Amazonia, Escape, Players, Spicy Fingers, Sticky Fingers, the Makati Inn and Joe Bananas.
By the time I ended up creating the Happy Wednesday brand for the Hong Kong Jockey Club in around 2012, the world, let alone the city, had moved online, and though there remained a pulse in the real world, one could sense that the walls were closing in.
They did when Covid and the lockdown years created locked down minds and a post pandemic mentality that exists today inside a growing global recession.
This is what many businesses were slow to see heading their way and how to trim the fat.
In a gambling driven industry where the word “integrity” is an oxymoron, it might be a better idea for horse racing to get buck naked and announce that THIS is who it is and restart the engines before they’re permanently switched off.
The rest is just more and more of the old Joan Rivers makeovers and creaky facelifts and much starting to look like a nightmare at the museum and putting lipstick on a pig.
You know what they say about a pig and lipstick, right?
This is what horse racing very often is and no amount of flouncing around in designer threads is going to have any meaning nor lasting power because NO. ONE. CARES.
This is the best place for ALL of us who care about today and tomorrow and our kids and grandkids to take stock and start to really really really try and see what people DO care about other than being fed more and more greed until becoming a bloated butterball and self imploding like Mr Creosote did after succumbing to that one last wafer.
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