Romantic Warrior Retired: Inside The Greatest Career In Hong Kong Racing
From Moonee Valley to Tokyo, Meydan to Riyadh, he went wherever the best horses were. The people who watched him do it remember a champion who never took the easy option.
Romantic Warrior Retired: Inside The Greatest Career In Hong Kong Racing
From Moonee Valley to Tokyo, Meydan to Riyadh, he went wherever the best horses were. The people who watched him do it remember a champion who never took the easy option.
2 September, 2026Romantic Warrior has been retired, bringing to a close one of the greatest and most unique careers in racing history.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club announced the retirement on Wednesday, saying the decision was taken by the horse’s connections in consultation with Club veterinarians after further detailed diagnostic imaging and assessment of his front leg at the Club’s veterinary hospital. Idol Horse understands the imaging showed abnormalities in the leg opposite the one surgically pinned in May 2025.
Romantic Warrior will not leave the Jockey Club’s care immediately. He will spend the next three months at Conghua Racecourse under continued monitoring by Club veterinarians before being moved to a retirement home through the HKJC’s RESTART aftercare programme. The Club did not say where that home will be.
A farewell ceremony will be held at Sha Tin later this season, with details to be confirmed.
It was the outcome Danny Shum Chap-shing had prepared everyone for. The trainer told Idol Horse on Sunday that “any risk” would mean his great champion was retired, stressing the connection he has with the horse.
“I love him like a son and if there was any risk at all he will be retired,” Shum said. “We are connected in our hearts.”
The decision ended the career of a horse who won 24 of his 31 starts and was placed in five of the others, never finishing worse than second in the nearly three years since his first overseas victory in the 2023 Cox Plate. He won 15 Group 1 races – more than any horse trained in Hong Kong – and three of those came abroad, in three different countries. He retires as the highest-earning racehorse in the history of the sport with HK$288,745,697 (US$36.8m) in prize money, a figure no horse anywhere has approached.
The record book will take some time to catch up with Romantic Warrior. He won the Hong Kong Cup four times, the first horse to win it more than twice. He won the QEII Cup four times, another mark no horse had reached. His 15 Group 1 wins sits five clear of Golden Sixty’s 10, and he took the Jockey Club Cup three times and was named Champion Middle-Distance Horse in five consecutive seasons. He was the first International Sale graduate to win the Hong Kong Derby, the first Hong Kong horse to win the Cox Plate, and the third – after River Verdon and Voyage Bubble – to complete the Triple Crown. He was named Horse of the Year in 2023-24 and shared the title again last season, the only honour on the list where he does not stand alone: Golden Sixty won it three times.
Romantic Warrior cost HK$4.8 million (US$612,266) at the 2021 Hong Kong International Sale after he was sourced for the Hong Kong Jockey Club by former champion Irish jockey Michael Kinane. He was knocked down to Peter Lau and returned that outlay some sixty times over, bringing renewed focus to Sha Tin’s unique annual parade-ring auction.
But the numbers were never the point with Romantic Warrior. What set him apart was where he was willing to go, and who he was willing to face.
In an era when the best horses are increasingly campaigned to protect a record, Romantic Warrior took on all-comers and was often placed outside his comfort zone by his ambitious owner. He won Group 1 races at 1600 metres and at 2400 metres. He won them in Hong Kong, in Australia, in Japan and in the United Arab Emirates. He was sent to Saudi Arabia to take on the best dirt horse in the world, Forever Young, on its specialist surface, losing in one of the most epic contests of all-time. Such was Lau’s sense of sporting occasion, he was still recently floating the idea of returning to Riyadh again next year.
Hong Kong Jockey Club chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, speaking to Idol Horse at Sha Tin last week when the possibility of retirement was raised, said it was that willingness – both of the connections to tackle new challenges, and the competitiveness of the horse himself – that defined him.
“I believe he’s one of the truly unique horses in global racing history,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said. “I don’t know how many other horses have traveled to so many countries, run in so many races, overcome so much.
“It’s how he’s raced that sets him apart. If you look at a horse who’s shown, over years, the ability to win from 1200 metres up to top-class racing on different surfaces – it’s nearly impossible.”
Engelbrecht-Bresges added that the horse’s will-to-win must have factored in the retirement decision, noting that some injured horses hold back as they age, but that Romantic Warrior did not.
“He doesn’t know how to take a backward step – he has the real lion heart of a winner. The ultimate racehorse. There are brilliant horses, but what he’s achieved in his career, I don’t think you can fully describe it. He has presence. He has confidence.
“Some horses get a little smarter – and a little more cautious – with age. Not him. He always puts himself on the line.”
The 2022 Hong Kong Cup was the race that told owner Peter Lau Pak-fai what he had – a four and a half length demolition of a field stacked with Japanese talent.
“I said wow, well maybe this is going to be one of the all-time greats,” Lau told Idol Horse last month, as he waited on the scan results that would decide his horse’s future.
He had already made his peace with whatever came next. “Even if he retired tomorrow, I would consider myself the luckiest and happiest owner in the world,” Lau said.
The 2023 Cox Plate made him a horse the whole racing world knew, a Hong Kong galloper going to Moonee Valley and beating Australia’s Mr Brightside in a photo finish. He then came home and won first-up.
The 2024 Yasuda Kinen followed, then a track record in Dubai, then the Saudi Cup tilt on dirt against Forever Young – a defeat that told you more about the stable’s ambition than a dozen soft wins at home would have. As Shane Dye wrote in Idol Horse of that loss in Riyadh, which was followed by another agonising second at Meydan to Soul Rush, “It didn’t lower his colours, him getting beaten. If anything, it showed Danny’s courage as a trainer.”
Then, at eight, after surgery on the other front leg that would have ended most careers, came the season that cemented the horse’s legacy. Six starts, six wins, five of them Group 1s, combined winning margins of ten and a half lengths. A record fourth Hong Kong Cup. A record fourth QEII Cup, in a race Shum called “The strongest QEII Cup, I think, in the last 10 to 15 years”. And in May, the Champions & Chater Cup and completion of the aforementioned Hong Kong Triple Crown.
He went back to Sha Tin that day to face down one of the few blemishes on his record, his loss to Russian Emperor in 2023. Shum was unbothered. “He’s a much better horse now than he was then,” he said that week. “He’s more mature, he’s stronger, and he’s shown this season he handles the distance much better. Everything is perfect. He tells me he is ready.”
The win earned him a share of the Horse of the Year title, the first time the honour had been split, the judging panel unable to separate him from champion sprinter Ka Ying Rising. Two flawless campaigns had run in parallel all season, and in the end nobody could make a case for one that did not also make a case for the other.
Shum has never hidden how much this horse cost him emotionally. “When he was hurt, it was hard, it was very painful for me, I could feel it,” he said when Romantic Warrior was sidelined for surgery. “It’s just like if he was my son – any parent in the world would think it, when their child has a fever or is hurt – you feel it more – and you would say ‘I want to take the pain for you.'”
That is the register he has always spoken about this horse in, and it is worth remembering when the tributes are counted, because what Shum did with Romantic Warrior belongs in any conversation about the great training performances in the sport’s history. He took a HK$4.8 million “ISG” and won Group 1s with him at 1600 metres and 2400 metres, on turf and on dirt, in four countries across five seasons. He brought him back from surgery at the age of eight to go six-for-six and win a Triple Crown. Trainers can go a career without one horse like that; the harder thing is not to waste him, and Shum never did.
Shum has spent a career asking questions, and has said his greatest teacher was Romantic Warrior. The great gelding gave him a lesson he wants to pass on to the next generation when it comes to connection with horses: “Touch them more, touch them, feel them. Get your hands on the horses.” ∎
