It has only been 56-days since the end of the last campaign, but with the summer break now over, the new season in Hong Kong gets underway at Sha Tin this Sunday. The opening card can be a bit of a minefield for punters, but with so much information available with regards to trackwork and fitness in Hong Kong, it is not necessarily the difficult punting task that it first appears. Racing gets underway at 5:50am (UK time) and whilst you will need to set an alarm to watch the feature race at 6:50, the presence of Ka Ying Rising in the declarations should make that early start worthwhile. He is the star attraction on the opening day, but after a relatively low key start, the quality of racing on offer continues to improve and it promises to be a decent start to the 2024-25 campaign.
Here are my 3 best bets on the opening day card:
Race 2 – Lin Fa Shan Handicap – 6:20am
We begin the new season with some Class 5 handicaps. As with any race in the bottom grade, these contests probably won’t take a great amount of winning. The weights for race 2 are headed by Tattenham, who begins the season on a career low mark of 40. He was a winner at Happy Valley in October last year, but that was his only success in his 20-race career in Hong Kong and he has run all of his best races at the valley, so he would be a shock winner of this race on all known form.
Smart Leader is back down to his last winning mark and with Zac Purton booked to ride, he is of obvious interest. He has a decent record at the start of the season, including a win at Happy Valley in September 2019 and a 2nd placed finish on his first start last season, but as a 10-year-old with a record of 78-4-13, he doesn’t exactly leap off the page as a possible improver at this stage.
Everything seems to lead me back to Super Elite. He took his time to come to the boil for David Hall, but he ended the last campaign in winning form when he landed a handicap over this course and distance by 2-lengths on the final day of the campaign. It should be said that this was his first success in 14-starts, but it appeared that the penny had finally dropped, and I was particularly impressed by the way that he picked up in the closing stages to win going away. A 7-point rise in the weights will make things harder, but he is still able to race in the same grade and having spent almost all of last season racing at Happy Valley, he seemed much better suited to the wider turns at Sha Tin and I am more than hopeful that there will be further improvement to come.
Race 3 – The HKSAR Chief Executive’s Cup – 6:50am
This is the traditional feature race on the opening day of the season at Sha Tin, and it offers the chance to see the best horse racing on today’s card in the shape of Ka Ying Rising. A winner of 5 of his 7 starts so far in Hong Kong, he fully deserves his official rating of 111 and if he arrives here in the same form that he showed when winning the G3 Sha Tin Vase back in June, he will be very hard to beat. On that form, he looks to hold the next highest-rated Flying Ace, and it is highly likely that there is a lot more improvement to come. However, he has bigger targets ahead than this Class 1 event and with weight to concede, I think there is probably an each-way angle against him.
The horse who appeals most is Beauty Waves. A winner of a Dundalk maiden for Patrick Flynn in 2022 (when known as Starspangledwaves), he was a winner of a Class 2 handicap on his final start back in July and he was on an almost continuous upward curve last season, so he ought to be capable of holding his own at this level. He has hit the frame on 9 of his 10 starts in Hong Kong and although the form book will show that he won by just over a length in July, it doesn’t highlight the fact that he had to wait a long time for the gaps to appear in the home straight and that he was probably value for a much bigger winning margin. There is plenty of improvement still to come and his recent trackwork, which includes a Barrier trial success here on 30th August, would suggest that he is fairly straight for his seasonal return. There is an obvious risk that he will find Ka Ying Rising too strong, but he gets 20lbs from the likely favourite and I struggled to find 3 horses with better profiles than him, so he makes a lot of appeal (Win and Place).
Race 7 – Ta Mo Shan Handicap – 9:00am
Chiu Chow Spirit, Ching and Karma all ended last season in winning form, but all of them also have winning form when there is a strong early pace, and they can be held up to come with a late charge. In this small field, with limited pace angles, that looks to be an unlikely scenario. For that reason, I thought that Supreme Lucky was worth a chance here. He was an all the way winner on his seasonal return last season and although he was only able to add 1 further success to that early win, the smaller field and the fact that he has the plum draw in stall 1, could well see his connections revert to those tactics. Hugh Bowman looks to be an ideal jockey booking for that type of ride and the horse was already on my radar after an impressive win in a Barrier trial at Conghua at the end of last month. Superb Boy looked to be the only other pace angle that I could see, but it won’t be an easy task for Zac Purton to get him to the front from stall 7, so the percentage call is to assume that Supreme Lucky will be in front after the first 200-metres. If he is, Bowman should be able to control the pace and get first run in the home straight, which makes his mount one of the more interesting bets on the card.
Advised Bets
R2 - Super Elite - 1pt Win
R3 - Beauty Waves - 1pt Win & 1pt Place (2pts)
R7 - Supreme Lucky - 1pt Win
All bets and Profit/Loss recorded to local pool SP
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