Friday morning at Sha Tin and the skipper is on deck.
Trackwork is over and the FWD Champions Day stage is set for three elite contests featuring a host of G1 winners including a pair of superstars trained just 400m away.
His longstanding vision for a world-class racecourse in Mainland China is set to come to fruition this autumn.
And the good ship HKJC sails on while her British and American counterparts struggle to negotiate increasingly choppy waters.
A dozen global scribblers are at the Captain’s Table and Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges – now in his third decade at the helm of HK racing – holds forth on a host of key topics.
Champions Day 2026
It is all about quality. Beating Ka Ying Rising in the Sprint is not Mission Impossible, but it is very difficult and we are delighted that Satono Reve is here as he is a real top-class sprinter.
We have a top-class international miler in Jantar Mantar and the FWD QEII Cup is the best we have ever seen.
Christophe Lemaire feels Masquerade Ball could be one of the all-time greats in Japan and the horse looks extremely well settled.
It is fantastic that our French champion Sosie is back again, and Romantic Warrior seems in sensational form. It will be extremely interesting to see how it develops tactically. I expect there will be some pace in the race from Numbers, which will help Masquerade Ball, but from our perspective this is one of the best clashes we have ever had.
Ka Ying Rising and Romantic Warrior
It’s vital that we have horses like this to demonstrate what world class means and these are the heroes we should celebrate.
Ka Ying Rising is exceptional, the best sprinter I have seen. He is poetry in motion, but I sometimes feel that Romantic Warrior is not appreciated enough.
Which other horse has travelled the world like this? He has excelled in Hong Kong, Australia, Japan and Dubai and he would even have won the Saudi Cup if James McDonald had gone for home 50 metres later. He is in the same league as Ka Ying Rising. Different, yes, but in the same league.
The dawn of racing in Mainland China
We are part of China and will venture more into the Mainland, because it is key to attract a global fanbase. We have 18 million people to reach within half an hour by train, and it cannot be positioned as gaming, but horses like Ka Ying Rising create a completely different form of content and storytelling.
The real new racing fans are across the border and racing tourism has been so strategic to us, with 275,000 people coming here from the Mainland already this season, but we must position racing as global sport in combination with entertainment.
The grandstand at Conghua Racecourse is iconic, a combination of modern architecture with Chinese elements and an amazing digital experience. Ka Ying Rising and Romantic Warrior are important in telling our story, but you also need local heroes and jockeys like Vincent Ho and Jerry Chau and trainers like Danny Shum are great examples of that.
The threat of illegal betting operators
This is enormous – a global threat - and with crypto the whole thing gets a completely new dimension.
The whole racing industry is in danger of having its customer base undermined and illegal operators are specifically targeting customers aged 18-25, so the impact is both immediate and massive going forward. They are spending billions on advertising, some of it directly targeted at what we do, and we must do much more as operators to get a global united front and compete.
The bittersweet symphony of change
I said at the last Asian Racing Conference that racing is at an essential moment, not crisis, where it must decide on the future.
I had a long discussion with Lord Allen at the BHA. I cautioned him that the strategic direction he wanted to go in was the right one, but that you have to be very mindful of how you orchestrate change management.
If you try to orchestrate it too quickly you will have a cacophony as certain people will not play, and maybe you then say ‘you are not part of the orchestra.’
Maybe he tried to play the symphony too early. Sometimes, life is about timing and how you do trade-offs. You can say ‘this way or the highway’ if you have power. If you do not have power and are not in power, then you have to be even more skilful.
Affordability checks and promoting racing to a younger audience
This measure has clearly driven more people to non-regulated markets. Regulators try to fulfil their duty and tick a box, and this often leads to more harmful behaviour. Having said this, in Britain there were certain activities from the industry – with slot machines in betting shops based in areas with significant social issues – that were irresponsible.
You may get away with relying on addictive games for ten or fifteen years, but it can be deadly to your brand. The psychological attractiveness of our horse racing is the intellectual challenge. It is a mind game and, when you look at sports like the NBA and football, there is a tendency to provide even more data to make the experience richer and more interesting.
World Pool
How we can position and promote racing as a global sport is vital.
The advantage of World Pool is still the liquidity. There has been some discussion about pricing, and when you only want to bet on favourites maybe it’s not the right product for you, but World Pool value lies outside of that and it’s maybe for the more sophisticated customer. For me, the real competitive advantage of Pari Mutuel betting including World Pool lies in exotic bets including even Quinellas.
We are bringing on more race meetings, with our liquidity as the key driver, and in the next three years we hope to have even wider coverage to create a real global product that is not fragmented. We don’t want a race every five minutes, as people still need time to study, and one of our tasks is to create a new platform including bet builders with early payouts for an overall more competitive product.
Optimism
If I was not optimistic, I would be in the Bahamas, but I never give up if I think something is the right strategy. Human beings are not necessarily geared for changing quickly, but our agility as an industry has to be much more accelerated.
The world can change within a day, as we have seen, but I am still very optimistic in the future of racing. There will be a stronger concentration of those who can provide a customer experience relevant to a younger customer segment and our future will depend on how quickly we can adapt technology.
More from Sporting Life
- Racecards
- Fast results
- Full results and free video replays
- Horse racing news
- Horse racing tips
- Horse racing features
- Download our free iOS and Android app
- Football and other sports tips
- Podcasts and video content
Safer gambling
We are committed in our support of safer gambling. Recommended bets are advised to over-18s and we strongly encourage readers to wager only what they can afford to lose.
If you are concerned about your gambling, please call the National Gambling Helpline / GamCare on 0808 8020 133.
Further support and information can be found at begambleaware.org and gamblingtherapy.org
