Ricky Yiu sealed the champion trainer title at Happy Valley on Wednesday night to fulfill a lifelong dream, and he did it with a smile and a shrug.
With Hong Kong in the midst of a coronavirus ‘third wave’, the famous Valley crowd was not there to cheer his remarkable feat, and there was no presentation to mark his victory.
Yiu was fine with that.
“I’ve really achieved my goal, this is the peak of my career, but a lot of people are more excited than I am; the owners on WhatsApp were messaging me ‘Add oil’! The staff are very happy – I’m happy too, but I don’t have this excitement,” the first-time champion said.
“I’ve been in horseracing all my life – winning, losing, it happens every meeting so I take it very easily. Even when Sacred Kingdom won the Hong Kong Sprint, I kept quiet, I don’t know why, it’s just me.”
Despite his coolness, the sense of the achievement was not lost on the handler, whose career goes back to 1972 when he joined the first intake at the apprentice jockeys’ school; a career that has brought Group 1 successes with the world champion sprinter Sacred Kingdom, with Amber Sky in Dubai and Ultra Fantasy in Japan.
But at the start of this term, no one expected to be calling Yiu champion trainer. Despite his track record as an astute horseman, he is perennially mid-rank, and he entered this term off the back of a steady 29-win campaign.
“It wasn’t really expected,” he said. “I knew my horses would do well from the start of this season but it was only about two and a half or three months ago that I thought I had a chance. From then on I thought, ‘I’ll work on this’ but before that, no.
“I just put my head down, kept working and kept focusing. When I saw they weren’t catching up, it’s a once in a lifetime chance, so I went for it. I always look forward but I did look over my shoulder and there was Francis (Lui) and Tony (Cruz), these two trainers were catching me up.”
Lui and Cruz were breathing down his neck into last Sunday’s Sha Tin fixture. Cruz nailed a double but Yiu delivered a bazooka of a treble to arrive at the downtown finale with a four-win cushion, his tally running at 67 – including six trebles and 10 doubles – to his rivals’ 63.
“I was four in front, so this last meeting at the Valley, to win three or four would be a miracle – it’s a big ask. When I won the last race at Sha Tin, I knew the chance was mine,” Yiu said.
- Hong Kong Jockey Club
