After Ka Ying Rising strolled to a 19th consecutive win in Hong Kong on Monday, John Ingles looks at some other notable winning streaks.
It was another routine win for Timeform’s 2025 Horse of The Year Ka Ying Rising at Sha Tin on Monday. His latest win came in the Sprint Cup, a Group 2 contest, which meant he had to give 5 lb to each of his six rivals - but that didn’t exactly level the playing field. Quite the opposite, in fact, as his winning margin of just over four lengths was his largest yet since he began his winning streak in February 2024.
In so doing, he lowered his own track record for Sha Tin’s six furlongs for a second time despite appearing to be just cruising home as usual in the closing stages. For the third race running and eighth time in all he was chased home by Helios Express, at 69/1 the only one of his rivals not to start at three-figure odds.
Ka Ying Rising has long since stopped being a betting proposition for Hong Kong punters. But every win from now on takes him further into new territory as his latest win was his 19th in a row. He equalled the previous Hong Kong record of 17 straight wins, set by Silent Witness, in the Centenary Sprint Cup in January and then beat it in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Cup in February while setting another track record over seven furlongs.
Silent Witness was also a sprinter and established his winning streak between Boxing Day 2002 and April 2005. All of his wins in that period came at Sha Tin, whereas Ka Ying Rising has ventured abroad, for the Everest at Randwick in Sydney which is reportedly on his agenda again this October.
Like Ka Ying Rising, Silent Witness was a dual winner of the Hong Kong Sprint (when it was still run over the straight five furlongs), and he was twice named Hong Kong’s Horse of The Year, an accolade which Ka Ying Rising is sure to receive for the second year running when the current Hong Kong season ends in July.
In the end, it was a step up in trip which brought Silent Witness’ winning streak and unbeaten record (Ka Ying Rising was beaten twice early in his career) to an end. The incentive to step Silent Witness up to a mile came from the creation of the Asian Mile Challenge which offered a million-dollar bonus for any horse which could win the Champions Mile at Sha Tin and the Yasuda Kinen at Tokyo three weeks later.
Silent Witness’ bid for win number 18 was shown live on Channel 4’s The Morning Line as there was British interest in the race with Mark Johnston sending over the previous year’s 1000 Guineas winner Attraction. She finished well beaten, and while Silent Witness made a bold bid to make all, he couldn’t quite hold off his own stablemate Bullish Luck who got up on the line to beat him a short head.
But by winning 17 races in a row, Silent Witness had already surpassed the 16 consecutive wins achieved by the likes of Citation, the 1948 US Triple Crown winner, unbeaten Italian colt Ribot whose wins in the 1950s included two Arcs and a King George, and American horse Cigar, winner of the inaugural Dubai World Cup in 1996. More recently, Frankel had retired unbeaten in 14 starts.
However, 16 wins was a rather arbitrary landmark because, as pointed out in the essay on Silent Witness in Racehorses of 2005, ‘a number of horses have run up longer winning sequences, though for the most part they are an obscure bunch, either because they date from far back in the history of the sport or because they competed outside major racing countries’. According to the Guinness Book of Horse Racing Records, the world-record holder with 56 consecutive wins is Camarero who raced in Puerto Rico in the 1950s.
Ka Ying Rising’s 19 wins in a row now puts him alongside the American mare Zenyatta who wasn’t beaten until her twentieth and final start in the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Churchill Downs. Invariably produced from well off the pace by her regular jockey Mike Smith, on this occasion Zenyatta was left with a bit too much ground to make up and failed by just a head to peg back the winner Blame. Zenyatta’s racing record included 13 Grade 1 wins, mostly against her own sex, though she did make history in the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Classic against male rivals when becoming the only filly or mare to date to win the race.
Therefore, if Ka Ying Rising wants a twenty-first century winning streak established in a top racing jurisdiction to chase, then the remarkable Australian mares Black Caviar and Winx are the pair he should now have in his sights.
For sprinter Black Caviar, 19 was also a significant number of wins as her victory in the Lightning Stakes at Flemington in February 2012 equalled the then record for metropolitan racing in Australia. By the time she showed up at Royal Ascot later that year in a sporting bid for the Diamond Jubilee Stakes, her unbeaten record stood at 21 races.
It was very nearly ended at Ascot, though. Days after Frankel had opened the meeting starting at 10/1-on for the Queen Anne Stakes, Black Caviar was sent off at 6/1-on for the Diamond Jubilee. Her regular jockey Luke Nolen almost took things too easily once she’d hit the front and gone over a length up, having to shake her up in the final strides to hold off the French pair Moonlight Cloud and Restiadargent by a head and a neck in a scrambling finish.
By the time Black Caviar had run her final race the following spring, her unbeaten record stood at 25 races, 15 of them at Group 1 level which was a new Australian record. That included a third win in what was by then the Black Caviar Lightning in which she broke the track record for Flemington’s five furlongs.
But it wouldn’t be long before Black Caviar’s records, impressive though they were, would be torn up by another Australian mare. Unlike Black Caviar, Winx didn’t have an unbeaten record to defend. She started off winning her first three starts but then won only one of her next seven. But when she won the Sunshine Coast Guineas, a Group 3 contest at the track of that name in May 2015, she began a winning streak of 33 races over a period of nearly four years which meant she would never be beaten again.
Appropriately enough, Winx passed Black Caviar’s winning streak when notching her 26th win on the bounce in the Winx Stakes at Randwick in August 2018, a race renamed in her honour which she had won twice previously when it was the Warwick Stakes. With a total of 25 Group 1 wins to her name, she had several other multiple wins in the same race, notably Australia’s most important weight-for-age contest, the Cox Plate which she won four times between 2015 and 2018.
Unlike Ka Ying Rising and Black Caviar, Winx never ventured overseas during her winning streak, or in her entire career for that matter, though she was more versatile trip-wise, counting Group 1 wins from seven to eleven furlongs. Her final win came with a third successive win in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Randwick in April 2019 at odds of 16/1-on.
Ka Ying Rising’s opportunity to extend his winning run to 20 will come at Sha Tin on Sunday 26 April, Champions Day, in the Chairman’s Sprint Prize which he’ll be bidding to win for the second year running after getting the better of Japan’s leading sprinter Satono Reve last year.
He’s not the only horse on the world stage compiling an impressive winning streak at present, though. Once again, it’s an Australian filly who is on a roll. Autumn Glow has won all eleven career starts for Winx’s trainer Chris Waller, the last two of them being at Group 1 level in the Verry Elleegant Stakes (formerly the Chipping Norton) and the George Ryder Stakes, two more races which Winx won four times. On Saturday, Autumn Glow will bid to make it twelve out of twelve on a first try over a mile and a quarter in the Queen Elizabeth.
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