Perennial favourite Size but there are hurdles

When John Size was coming off a seventh placing in the previous championship at this time in 2024, we called him an even money chance to win the title.

He went on to complete the win with some authority, after a slow start which has become his norm, a sharp sprint through the field mid-season to get to the lead and then grinding down to the line to hold the margin.

In fact, 9 wins in June-July was one of Size’s better season finishes.

He trained at least one winner at 44 of the 88 meetings, made it a record-extending 13 titles in 24 seasons and that backs up our rubber stamp of the Australian as a 2.0 chance to win in any given season. We’d say he’s favourite again, given his record, but there are some structural challenges this season, as we will show.

Of course, championships are won by putting up the most wins - it is unambiguous but also can give a wrong impression from the point of view of punting on them.

Size's high level of success over a long time has been fully digested by the betting public, leading to an an equally-high expectation from every runner and we often point out that betting on the stable is a tough path.

Just as we do for the jockeys, we like to look at who is overperforming according to the market and it would certainly produce a different championship result.

Looking back at last season, the big surprise was Manfred Man, clearly the best performer by this metric and also posting 45 wins to give him his career-best tally, though it earned him only an eighth ranking on the championship.

Size is usually well down this list, simply due to those high public expectations being tough to meet but, despite some hangover issues after his championship win the season before, Francis Lui again impressed with his figures.

Some other yards also perform beyond the perception of them when judged in this fashion, so punters would be wise to take note of the reality of some yards and not just the popular views of their standing.

Still, we are looking forward here to the 2025-26 championship, and championships are won with winners, not betting value.

When we talk about the numbers around training championships in Hong Kong, there are some misconceptions. One is around total runners.

While Size (2023) and Caspar Fownes (2021) have won the title in recent years after sending out more runners than any other yard, the “swarm” approach has not generally been successful.

Size also won titles in 2006 and 2004 with the most starters, but that’s all of the successes in the last 25 years for the busiest trainer of the season and Size famously did take his first championship in 2001-02 with only 291 starters.

What is certainly relevant is the ability of a trainer to recycle his string.

The advantage of mega stables in Australian, like Ciaron Maher and Chris Waller, is their capacity to constantly replenish their racing stables with huge on-the-books teams throughout the season and I’m sure that’s the same all over the world in jurisdictions without caps on stable numbers.

Hong Kong is different, given that no trainer can have more than 70 horses and, because horses basically stay in training for the entire season without breaks, it’s not that easy to freshen up the talent.

And that's where stable “churn” plays a role.

Within a season, horses will retire, new imports arrive, others come and go between trainers, so the 70-limit doesn’t tell the whole story. Churn is the term we use to talk about how many horses a trainer actually starts during a campaign.

Last season’s championship runner-up, David Hayes had the most horses from that point of view, with 81 different starters against the 74 accessed by Size, and that helped Hayes to be competitive with a strike rate slightly better than his long term average level. 

The follow-on from that in the table above, which has more relevance to the coming season than the previous season, is how well-used those horses were and how many of them are still in the yard and returning for the new campaign.

The shorthand for this is what is often described in the media as the championship hangover for the title-winning trainer – it isn’t about how much champagne was downed at their big celebration!

Title races are often hard fought between two trainers, right down to the final stages of the season, which means their stable runners have been out as often and for as long as they can get them to race. As the stable has clearly been successful, this also means that many of the horses have also clawed their way up the handicap ratings to their limit.

So, a title-winning trainer, who has squeezed his team and then has to turn up again with most of the same horses and try to do it again, is at something of a disadvantage in an overwhelmingly-handicap environment.

Two seasons ago, Francis Lui and Pierre Ng fought a tooth and nail race that only ended in the final races of the season – both left no stone unturned – and it showed in 2024-25, when neither of them was ever a contender, though Ng did again lead early.

Size’s record shows that he has been brilliant at managing this side of the game – he won three titles in succession from 2002 to 2004, and four on end from 2016 to 2019, but is the only trainer to win back-to-back championships this century and even his career has more of a one year on, one year off type of pattern.

And that’s where we are for the new term.

Size has a current stable list of 67 horses on the HKJC website and 53 of them are from the 74 horses which he raced last season. Compare that with where he was 12 months ago, coming off one of his worst years, when Size had only 40 of the 72 horses he used the previous season.

Furthermore, Size had 25 horses with more than 10 starts last season, including the iron horse, Bundle Of Charm, who ran 21 times, telling us that a big chunk of the returning stable was well explored. On the positive side, most of those who did win last season look capable of winning again, but the handicapper will catch them at some stage and Size’s ability to remain a contender will again come down to his core strength of getting hold of talented new unraced horses capable of multiple wins.

Hayes had 27 horses run more than 10 times last season and has 55 of last year’s runners returning, so he isn’t ideally-placed either, and we note he might have to uphold that higher-than-average strike rate.

Tony Cruz, a two-time champion but coming off only a sixth-place finish, looks in terrible shape. Cruz ran 75 horses in total last season, 33 of them more than 10 times and now has 56 of last season’s team returning, and that’s 80 per cent of his available team as currently listed by HKJC.

So, looking for trainers in better shape, Lui looks more competitive again this term, the numbers look slightly improved for Ng coming off a moderate result – and he can probably be relied upon to show early speed once more. Mark Newnham has some room to recycle after just an average usage of his runners and an average percentage of them returning, but the stand out is Eustace in his second term. Only four trainers used fewer horses than Eustace last season, and only a tick of over 60 per cent of the 71 horses currently listed in his yard are returners. That tells you he has plenty of fresh ammunition for the new battle – the challenge then is that they produce the goods on the track. First season trainers usually do better in season two but this is a very good profile for Eustace to make strong Improvement on his 36-win debut.

Four-time champion Caspar Fownes was lurking around the title in third again last season and his churn profile is not bad but his performance at Sha Tin continues to be a problem.

He was the leading Happy Valley trainer last season – that’s not unusual – he was a good enough performer on the dirt but the gap in his game is the main track. More than half the races every season are run on the Sha Tin turf but Fownes is only a middle of the table performer on that surface.

If he can improve in that area, he’s a contender and, since our blog last week regarding the jockeys’ 2025-26 season, a rumour has circulated that the long time freeze out between Fownes and champion jockey Zac Purton might be thawing.

They were once a dominant combination before a falling out and Purton has had only 12 rides for the stable since September 2020 - some in the International Jockeys Championship at Happy Valley, where riders are drawn by ballot, or when Purton was a late race day option to replace an injured rider. A return to their successful partnership would be positive for Fownes.

With the retirement of Benno Yung at the end of last season, the off-season stable changes have been dominated numerically by his former inmates.

A big chunk of them, fourteen horses, have gone to Michael Chang, who mostly gets the pick of them with James Tak, Fun Elite, Super Joy N Fun and Fun Together amongst the group.

Size, in a rarity, has actually featured in the off-season transfers and that makes it worth noting. The champion trainer doesn’t often take horses from other stables – Ka Ying Power and Endued, both from his former assistant Yung, will be his first stable transfers since 2016 and he has taken only three in the last 12 years. Ka Ying Power has been a handy, consistent type but Endued really catches the eye as he is capable of becoming a four-year-old series player without having to make much improvement.

Incoming trainer, Brett Crawford has taken on thirteen of the ex-Yung team as a big part of the 26 horses transferred to him during the summer.

While most of his transfers have the familiar “renovator’s dream” look that is eternally the lot of any new trainer, there are a couple of prospects amongst them. His standout transfer though is Nucleozor. Unbeaten in three starts in New Zealand as a juvenile, he had four outings without earning a dollar at three in Hong Kong but his first three runs were sound enough before he was knocked right out of his final race at Happy Valley. He’s no superstar and still rated in the middle of Class 3, so it isn’t a free kick, but if Crawford gets him firing he can win races.

Perhaps auspiciously, Crawford will turn 54 on the season’s opening day, September 7, and of course he will inevitably be compared to the previous and particularly the recent new arrivals.

Of the latest three new trainers, Eustace and Newnham performed at an average or better level at the first time out. Cody Mo’s debut numbers were below average but he improved sharply in year two to be on the heels of Newnham.

As we suggested last year for Eustace -who ended up with 36 wins – a debut of 25 is probably a pass mark in a new and foreign environment – not just the tracks, horses and climate but the quirks of Hong Kong’s owners and an arcane entry system - but the accompanying table shows the average level is around 31 wins.

Crawford will be the first new South African handler since David Ferraris, who landed 24 wins in 2003-04, and Tony Millard, who won 23 races in 1999-2000 (but also won the Derby that season).

His 26 transfers will be the working crew for the first part of the season before fresh imports can bolster the ranks. As forlorn as some of them might look on paper, every new trainer tends to start with the same proposition before them and success is their best advertising.

Newnham’s first Hong Kong win came with Happy Hero, a 10-start maiden who had not finished closer than eighth in two campaigns with Dennis Yip, but scored three times in Newham’s debut year.