Romantic Warrior completed Hong Kong racing’s Triple Crown on Sunday night, with James McDonald guiding the champion to victory in the Standard Chartered Champions and Chater Cup at Sha Tin before taking a three-meeting suspension that will rule him out of the Queensland Oaks meeting at Eagle Farm on June 6.
The win lifted Romantic Warrior’s career earnings to HK$288 million, or about $62 million, and made him only the third horse to sweep the series, joining River Verdon in 1994 and Voyage Bubble last year. It was a finish that looked in doubt for much of the race. Romantic Warrior settled fourth behind Numbers and Romantic Thor, then worked into the contest, overhauled Numbers at the 50m mark and edged clear as he rattled home in 22.77s.
For McDonald, the result came after a punishing two-day stretch that began 27 hours earlier in Brisbane, where he had already ridden a Group 1 winner aboard Birdman in the Doomben Cup. He was then punished for taking the line of third-placed Deep Monster in the home straight, an incident that cost him the ride until after the June 6 meeting. He did not hide his view of the horse’s place in the sport after the race, calling Romantic Warrior a Triple Crown winner who thoroughly deserved the praise attached to him and saying he agreed with the assessment that the gelding was already an immortal. He added that the horse had now stamped himself as Horse of the Year material by landing the Triple Crown.
The Triple Crown remains one of Hong Kong racing’s rarest achievements, and Romantic Warrior now owns a record that puts him into a tiny class. The eight-year-old has won 24 races from 31 starts and stretched his Group 1 winning range from 1600m to 2400m, a distance span that underlines how unusual his profile has become. Sunday’s result also arrived on a strong night for the stable and for the rider’s main rivals in the championship tables: Zac Purton rode a treble to move to his 1998th Hong Kong win, while Danny Shum’s double took his seasonal tally to 56 wins.
Shum said the race had been mapped out in advance, with the instructions simple: settle the horse, let him relax and ask him to strike late. He said the plan worked because Romantic Warrior hit the line strongly over the last 400m and praised McDonald as a top-class jockey. The trainer also said the horse would now be given a break, with Conghua under consideration for the layoff, before next season’s targets are decided. For now, the numbers tell the story as plainly as the finish did: a horse worth HK$288 million, a rider heading into suspension, and a championship that was sealed the hard way.
