With him sidelined for at least tonight’s races for testing positive to Covid-19, it means that with The Zac Man away, the other cats have more room to play.
In another slice of “mandatory” Hong Kong weirdness coming into play, Hugh Bowman, below, who was supposed to start his three month riding stint in the city tonight and was going to be the main beneficiary of The Zac Man’s absence, has also been sidelined.
Why? Because as a close contact- a family member is infected- Hugh must isolate for a week.
Apart from Hong Kong, once again, looking for all the world to be lagging behind everyone else in its ways of returning the city into some form of normalcy, and coming close to “living with Covid”, the absence of The Huge One-his Twitter handle boasts @hugebowman- means trainers explaining to owners the need to go through another round of finding suitable and available riders for their runners.
Most Hong Kong owners can’t exactly be described as being understanding. They own the horses, they pay the bills and, possibly above all, it’s about that very Chinese complexity called “face”- and not losing “face”.
What doesn’t help anything in Hong Kong to have “normal transmission resume” is continuing to function in its own restrictive bubble of anonymous masked up people.
There are then peripheral problems like an “error” as what happened early this week when “Glory To Hong Kong”, a song associated with the droogs who bashed the city into smithereens in 2019, was played instead of the China national anthem at the finals of Asian Rugby Sevens Tournament in South Korea when Hong Kong competed against Korea. This was a big no-no.
The government, perhaps going a little over the top about getting to the bottom of how this happened and demanding apologies has already created yet another reason for a mini panic-demic in already panicky Hong Kong.
No matter what might be said and done as damage control, audiences hear what they want to hear.
All that happy happy song and dance about the success of the recent Hong Kong Rugby Sevens suddenly rings hollow.
In this Insta-Everything world, very few have time to read, let alone read the fine print and what happened yesterday is quickly forgotten.
Another thing is that because after years of bungling by the city’s former bumbling Housewife Chief Executive, most people in Hong Kong have become terminally suspicious and negative- about everything.
Trying to be positive- and, ironically, positive having become a taboo word- tonight could at least be a diversion from gloom and doom and some “racertainment”.
For a change, rather than watching The Zac Attack go after every Hong Kong racing record left, and systematically breaking these while setting and owning new ones, there’s going to be some different theatre.
When looking at tonight’s races, a good place to start might be to know which runners Zac might have ridden, and then which ones Hugh might have ridden, see who’s now on them and follow these.
For instance, in the last race of the night, and the race we’ll be focusing on, Jye McNeil, below, has a great chance to ride his first winner in Hong Kong aboard Comet Splendido (5).
This runner was first a ride for Zac, then Hugh, and now goes to the young Aussie riding at only his second meeting of a short stint in Hong Kong.
Will we be listening to any tipsters? Not really. Why would anyone who really knows anything about what’s going to win want to tip anything with odds and have these odds come tumbling down because of everyone jumping on the same bandwagon?
Looking at tonight’s card of nine races, the first two races are Class 5 affairs and where anything can win.
We’ll be giving these races a miss and wait for the last three races that include some of the better gallopers of the night who are running and try our luck at taking quartet bets.
In Race 7, the obvious bankers are Excellent Peers (4) ridden by Matthew Chadwick and Attulbigdeal (2) to be ridden by Luke Currie. Beauty Glory (1) and Our Happy Glory (7) could be legs with one or two outsiders thrown in.
In Race 8, tackling Happy Valley for the first time with the under-utilised Ruan Maia aboard, The Irishman must be included plus the consistent Packing Award (8). Other chances are Fa Fa (7) and Mr Ascendency (9) with So We Joy (10) for odds
In the last, the best betting race of the night, using Comet Splendido as the banker in our quartets, for legs, we would be including Never Too Soon (6), Winning Dragon (9), Rising From Ashes (7) and a couple of roughies like Delightful Laos (8), Pegasus General (11) and Villa Fionn (12).
The jockeys we’ll be following will be the two Matthews- Poon and Chadwick- and then crossing everything very tightly and hoping for the best.
