Purton from daylight again in HK jockeys' title

With eight championships now banked and Zac Purton sitting second to only 13-time champion Douglas Whyte in collecting titles, the Australian’s continued reign at the top of Hong Kong’s jockey roster looks to have only two potential threats – retirement or the arrival of James McDonald.

Both have been recurring themes now for several years, with Purton himself frequently foreshadowing the next season as his last and racing fans in Hong Kong and Australasia on the edge of their seats awaiting McDonald’s move to Sha Tin.

It’s lucky nobody has been holding their breath for either.

The last time the jockeys’ championship was competitive was 2021-22 - Joao Moreira’s last full time Hong Kong season – and that isn’t going to change in 2025-26. Last season, Purton missed almost one seventh of the season through injury but still had almost twice as many winners as runner-up Hugh Bowman.

There has been a sense that Purton is ripe for dethroning - or at the very least ripe to have a serious contest - but it isn’t just anyone who can provide that.

McDonald is probably the only rider on the planet who would come with a guarantee but he has unfinished business for another year or so running down Damien Oliver’s all-time Group One-winning record.

Perhaps then the Kiwi-born rider will make the move, though there is an argument that McDonald has the best of both worlds anyway by not being based full time in Hong Kong. Despite being on the other side of the world – other than his recent mid-season walk-on, walk-off winter stints - he is called on regularly to ride the best Hong Kong horses, like Romantic Warrior, Voyage Bubble and others, and flies in for serious chances in most of the major races at Sha Tin.

If Hong Kong’s prizemoney is a reason for McDonald to move, consider this – last season, he had only 121 rides in Hong Kong but his mounts were still third on the jockey prizemoney rankings with $HK 111.7 million, behind only Purton (HK 213 million) and Bowman (HK 139.5 million), both of whom had over 590 rides.

 It took fourth-ranked Brenton Avdulla more than 500 rides to assemble $97 million in stakes and Andrea Atzeni was next with $95 million from 619 mounts.

So, when or if James McDonald moves to Hong Kong full time, yes, I expect him to have the talent and support to topple Purton, but it isn’t happening yet.

As for Purton’s oft-discussed retirement, that’s a story which has had long legs.

Purton himself has often highlighted physical niggling issues that will mean he is not going to ride until fifty, as many of the best jockeys do these days, but he was happier on that score once Covid was in the rear view mirror and retirement seems unlikely while he is partnering champion sprinter Ka Ying Rising.

Of course, Ka Ying Rising will age and decline, and Purton’s injury issues will not get better with time but, at 42, he is still quite a young man who would be a long time retired if he hung up the saddle any time soon and he has expressed no enthusiasm for training.

These are doubtless things that must come up when he considers his future but, for now, his future is winning a ninth title this season, likely with around 150-plus wins, more than enough to make him the first jockey to ride 2,000 winners in Hong Kong, and anything else would be a shock.

The competition for the quinella position looks more interesting and there are a few different things working for and against the chasers, including the ever-shifting sands of stable support, which can switch from season to season.

It was some big changes in trainer support that enabled Purton in 2017-18 to compete strongly again with Joao Moreira, after the Brazilian had spanked him three years in a row.

One of the important changes that appears very likely is the return of Vincent Ho, after a terrible set of injuries from a fall which has kept him out of racing since February. That is significant with several leading stables, as Ho does a large proportion of the riding for Francis Lui, Caspar Fownes and Pierre Ng and those are rides that won’t be available for the others in the Purton-chasing group.

Although runner-up Bowman beat home Atzeni by a comfortable 14 wins and Avdulla and Luke Ferraris were another 11 wins further back in joint fourth, what else is going on to alter those rankings and numbers?

Firstly, those winning tallies don't always tell the full story of who has ridden well or poorly.

A rider who is fed a constant diet of good chances will ride winners frequently, a rider with only 50-1 rides won't, no matter how well he or she rides.

To get to grips properly with that we like to look at how jockeys underperformed or overperformed according to the pre-race winning chances of their mounts and the table above shows last season's premiership ladder in that light.

Bowman has said in the media that he thinks he can improve on his 72 wins but, objectively, it’s hard to see how that will happen.

His weight rules him out of many runners in each race – a disadvantage in a jurisdiction where handicaps are over 97% of the program - and his record in the stewards’ room was excellent, losing only 3 days to suspensions last season, so his ability to increase his total race rides from 594 looks limited, That means he needs to improve his winning percentage - theoretically, possible, since his 72 wins came in well short of almost 80 expected from his mounts by the market – or he has to improve the quality of his mounts. In terms of support, he had more rides for Caspar Fownes last season than any other trainer but the back half of last campaign saw Fownes' stable apprentice Ellis Wong take over as the number one rider for that yard.

In the first half, Bowman had 68 rides for Fownes and Wong 40, but that flipped to 60 for Wong and 45 for Bowman in the second half.

His style as a run-on rider also works against Bowman and he has the worst statistical profile on frontrunners of any jockey currently riding in Hong Kong.

There are reasons to think Avdulla and Karis Teetan can improve their tallies, though.

Teetan had his worst season in eight years and it coincided with one of his worst years for careless riding suspensions (see table).

Teetan is also expected to benefit from incoming trainer Brett Crawford as the pair had a significant partnership when Teetan was last riding in South Africa.

Avdulla also racked up a decent set of penalties, too.

On the negative side, Atzeni, Bowman and Avdulla were the main beneficiaries when Purton’s  February 9 fall at Sha Tin kept him sidelined until March 30 and forced him to miss 128 of the season’s 847 races. Assuming a trouble-free season for Purton, that becomes a brake on the prospects of any of those riders improving their total.

Joint-fourth placed Ferraris is used to being the youngest rider in the jockeys’ room,- he has been since he arrived in Hong Kong and will be again this season – but had a breakthrough year in 2024-25 that included a Classic Mile win, an unlucky Derby second and he outperformed market expectations of his rides by more than any rider.

In my view, he is still a few years from his peak, so further improvement is expected in terms of his riding. His stewards’ room record of just two days’ suspension last season would be hard to improve but he will be helped by having had that year that showed him as one of the leading jockeys.

Unlike Purton, Bowman, Avdulla and Atzeni, Ferraris does not have the support of champion trainer John Size – in four seasons, he has yet to have a single mount for the premier yard – so things could get better if that was to change and he also had just one ride all season for another leading trainer, Tony Cruz.

Over 36 per cent of Ferraris’ prospective winning chances last season came for Mark Newnham, a trainer on the rise and a great connection, but he would benefit from a spread of support across more yards, especially the leading barns who don’t use him much at all.

These tables show the percentage of each jockey's rides last season from each trainer but with some qualifications. Only horses with a reasonable chance of winning - starting 21.0 or less in the market - are included and only jockeys with at least 40 eligible rides are on the tables. For example 9.9% of Zac Purton's rides at 21.0 or less came from John Size.

Highlighted in yellow are combinations with over 10% and green highlights combinations with 20% or more.

In some years, the incoming riders offer a point of interest but that isn’t a huge talking point this time with just two incoming jockeys.

We saw Richard Kingscote briefly last season and he did enough to earn a proper stint while David Probert, 36 and probably best described as a journeyman, will be making his first appearance.

The bad news for both is that few English riders get the right support from Hong Kong’s owners or trainers, but the good news is that two other former English-based riders, Atzeni and Harry Bentley, have been putting down some excellent advertising for them.

Perhaps it will be another area where the mood has shifted and they can benefit.