Will sour grapes be the winner at Hong Kong's Horse Of The Year?

It really hit home when my fellow diner across the table took a swig of sauvignon blanc and said: “All right then, what’s your market on the Horse Of The Year?”

We were talking about the award, not altogether in terms of who deserves it but how the voting might go – they’re not always the same thing.

But it doesn’t matter how you approach Friday night’s Horse Of The Year Award in Hong Kong – it’s going to be controversial, it’s going to be inconclusive and someone is going to be unhappy. The only thing missing from general dissatisfaction with the final result will be Donald Trump whining that it was stolen.

The Horse Of The Year, normally, comes in just two distinct flavours.

Nine times out of ten, the Horse Of The Year is blindingly obvious and the whole thing is functional and box ticking. A lovely photo opportunity for the owners but with an excitement bypass.

Or there are those years where the award winner is underwhelming – sorry, Pride Of Jenni fans in Australia but I thought she fell into that category – and you wonder if there should have been some horse more deserving. And then you realise there probably wasn’t.

So, as mentioned earlier, voting and deserving aren’t always the same thing.

We can go back 18 years in Hong Kong to the year that Dubai Sheema Classic winner, Vengeance Of Rain, was awarded Horse Of The Year, ahead of Viva Pataca, despite being thrashed not once but twice by Viva Pataca when they clashed back at Sha Tin after Dubai.

While trainer John Moore was rolling with the punches, it wasn’t a loss taken in good part by the embittered connections of Viva Pataca, casino mogul Stanley Ho and his family, and angry words flew.

That was a moment where it was easy to make a case, on racetrack form, for one horse clearly having bettered another and still lost out in the vote, as the panel – made up of a handful of Jockey Club officials and an equal number of journalists – preferred a foreign victory to any amount of form.

And that’s where we sit going into Friday night with the extraordinary scenario of three serious contenders for Horse Of The Year, any of which might be the boring, eminently-predictable winner in another season – Romantic Warrior, Ka Ying Rising and Voyage Bubble.

In a centre with such a small horse population, just 850 races and only 13 Group Ones, it is almost impossible for three horses to separately produce performances worthy of a Horse Of The Year award, but here we are.

To overseas followers of Hong Kong racing, it might raise a few eyebrows that Romantic Warrior might well be considered the outsider of the three.

Other Hong Kong horses have travelled successfully but none has carried the bauhinia flag with quite the same adventurous flair and success as Romantic Warrior. No horse from the Far East has been as recognisable and closely-followed by foreign fans and he has hardly had a bad year.

A winner of the Jockey Club Cup and a third consecutive Hong Kong Cup in his first two starts of the campaign, he added the Jebbel Hatta at Meydan to be unbeaten at the end of January, before failing by only a neck and then a nose, respectively, to add the Saudi Cup and Dubai Turf.

And there is an army of fans who felt that, had James McDonald waited a touch longer with the gelding in the Saudi Cup he would have won that and we might be having a different conversation.

The case against him is that that didn’t happen, leaving the globetrotting star with “just” the Hong Kong Cup and Jebbel Hatta as Group One wins for the campaign. The case for him must include that his connections have embraced the notion of true sportsmanship and global competition, which we all like to agree as desirable, instead of staying home like Golden Sixty or Beauty Generation and, conceivably, guaranteeing the Horse Of The Year Award.

That latter point also forms a centre piece of the argument against Voyage Bubble.

After one win from seven starts in the previous season, overshadowed by Golden Sixty and Romantic Warrior, and a rank failure in two attempts overseas, did Ricky Yiu’s six-year-old become a better horse this season?

He won five and finished second twice from seven appearances, but all at home and benefitting greatly from the retirement of Golden Sixty and the absence of Romantic Warrior on his foreign travels.

And Romantic Warrior’s absence was central to Voyage Bubble winning the Hong Kong Gold Cup in February - the middle leg of his tremendous achievement of becoming the first winner of Hong Kong’s Triple Crown since River Verdon in 1993. It’s a difficult feat – the Stewards’ Cup over 1600m is the first leg in January, the Gold Cup over 2000m the second a month later but then there’s a three-month wait until the final leg in the Champions & Chater Cup at the end of May, one of only three races over 2400m in the entire Hong Kong season. Difficult – but also not often attempted, so not so much of a surprise that it had been 32 years since the only previous winner of a Triple Crown.

He also comfortably defeated Soul Power into second in the Hong Kong Mile and that horse beat Romantic Warrior in Dubai.

The other negative argument on Voyage Bubble concerns his defeat, without bad luck or excuse, in the Champions Mile in April, when downed by the admirable but unspectacular Red Lion. In the words of one excellent form judge: no horse beaten by Red Lion should ever win Horse Of The Year.

And then there’s Ka Ying Rising, the new kid on the block, who has springboarded off awards this time last year for the Most Improved Horse and Champion Griffin (the best first season horse) at three years old to become the most talked-about short course horse on the planet at four.

In summary, the negative arguments assembled against him are that he has no overseas travel, no ascent of a mountain unclimbed for decades but, in the plus column, he is the only one of the three to be undefeated all season and the undisputed world champion of his racing division. Not only that but, with the exception of a Hong Kong Sprint, where a few things didn’t go quite the right way and his victory margin was small, he has trounced his rivals, run sizzling times and never looked in doubt.

There is also an argument made – and it’s a loose use of the description “argument” – that Ka Ying Rising shouldn’t win Horse Of The Year this year because he is just peaking and will likely win it next year anyway, while Voyage Bubble, a well-explored rising seven-year-old, and Romantic Warrior, a rising eight-year-old with a significant current injury issue, may be looking at their last opportunities.

Ka Ying Rising’s Group One tally of four lines up with the four for Voyage Bubble, against only the two for Romantic Warrior, but the Warrior is the only one with an overseas Group One.

If we hark back to that controversy with Vengeance Of Rain and Viva Pataca, it was the weight of an overseas Group One win – albeit in the world’s richest race on turf at that time – which swung the argument.

What weight will that domestic versus foreign travel argument carry this time and what will it say about the importance of global performances, or even the consistency of the voting panel’s criteria?

The local handicapper hasn’t an opinion – all three horses are rated 134 domestically – but the international classifications panel does, with Ka Ying Rising and Romantic Warrior on a figure of 126 and well clear of 121-rated Voyage Bubble.

For whatever you make of the different arguments, the result on Friday will make someone unhappy and might surprise a few around the world, whatever it is, but it is definitely not your stock, standard Horse Of The Year.