First season trainer Jimmy Ting’s flying start to the racing year continued today when he claimed a double in the first five races, all won by local trainers, at Sha Tin. He now boasts 16 winners for the racing year which takes him to the top of the trainer’s table, two ahead of Tony Millard.

Ting is certainly making a great fist of emulating Frankie Lor’s remarkable first season numbers last year. After the corresponding meeting in 2017, Lor was atop the premiership with 19 winners.

“The results have been great,’ Ting said, ‘I didn’t expect to have this many winners at this stage of the season but the horses are happy and healthy so I’m very happy. I thought the two horses today came with good chances to win.” His winners had support starting at 6.1 and 5.4 respectively. 

Ting’s double came with horses having their first run for the fledgling trainer – he  won the Kate Tokyo Handicap with Diamond Master and the Suisse Programme Handicap with Smiling Pride –  but he asserted he’s done nothing dramatically different with them.

“I’ve just been patient with them. I’m happy to wait until I’m confident their health is excellent, they’re in great shape and ready to go,” he said.

They’ve also come at an extraordinarily good strike rate of 30 per cent with 75 per cent of them having been ridden by local jockeys. “I’m local and I want to support the local jockeys, it’s as simple as that,” he said.

Keith Yeung and Umberto Rispoli were aboard Ting’s winners and Sa Sa Ladies’ Purse Day proved fruitful for each who doubled up on the program.

Yeung won the opening two races to take his season’s tally to five while Rispoli, who has endured a frustrating run of minor placegetters, also won on Chiu Chow Kid in the Kose Cosmeport Handicap to double his tally for the season.

Let Us Win Finally Does With Some Brazilian Magic

The aptly named Let Us Win finally had the prayer his name invokes answered at Sha Tin today when a photo finish winner of the Maria Galland Handicap under the urgings of returning jockey Silvestre de Sousa.

Hong Kong racing fans are well acquainted with the magic of Brazilian jockeys and perhaps today there was an element of that, combined with sheer strength and resolve, which saw de Sousa win on a horse which not even his countryman Joao Moreira had been able to cajole to victory.

The six-year-old gelding had failed to win in his previous 30 starts and, last start, his connections had endured the ultimate disappointment of losing a race on protest after the horse had finally crossed the line first.

De Sousa, riding for the first time in his current four months contract, was delighted to break through early. “He took some riding but it’s good times. It’s very good to get a winner early,” said the three times UK champion jockey whose win came in race four.

Let Us Win responded to de Sousa’s hard riding from a midfield spot at the 400 metres to win officially by a short head. De Sousa had ridden 33 winners in Hong Kong in two previous, albeit brief, riding stints in season 2015-16 and 2016-17.