Golden Sixty Brings Light And Learning To Vincent Ho’s Recovery
Hong Kong’s champion is settling into retirement, while his jockey continues working towards race riding again more than four months after the fall that caused a traumatic brain injury.
GOLDEN SIXTY and Vincent Ho stuck together through every one of the great gelding’s 31 races, featuring a classic series clean sweep and 10 Group 1 triumphs: a partnership that earned the brilliant galloper iconic status and gave Ho an international profile. They bonded in the good times and now that bond is helping Ho through the tough times.
Golden Sixty last raced in April 2024 and retired from racing officially in September of that year. He is now a few months settled into his new home at Northern Horse Park in Hokkaido – via a quarantine period in Australia – alongside an American quarter horse named John.
Ho has not sat on a horse since the 11th race at Sha Tin on February 9 when he went crashing to the ground from his mount Oldtown and was left with injuries that included a brain contusion and brain bleed. His routine since then has been all about recovery and rehabilitation in Hong Kong, but in May, he was given the all-clear for air travel.
His first flight was to Japan, to see Golden Sixty and his new buddy. He went back twice more before the month was out and each time, he not only felt the bond he has with the old champion, but also, typical of Ho, he found learning in his visits.
“I just wanted to make sure everything is ok and there is proper, nice equipment for him and all that,” Ho tells Idol Horse by phone as he walks into the lobby of a gym, en route to another session.
“He’s an old friend, so I want to visit him, but also, because of my injury, I haven’t been able to connect with horses for a while, and this horse is probably the only horse I 100 per cent trust. I know he’s reliable and will look after me all the time.”
Ho is impressed with Golden Sixty’s environment and is grateful that Northern Farm’s Katsumi Yoshida has enabled such a home for one of Hong Kong’s all-time greats, whose owner Stanley Chan accompanied the jockey on one of his visits.
“What Golden Sixty has done for us, for Hong Kong, he deserves the best,” Ho continues, referencing the emotional uplift the champion brought to the city through its Covid-affected years of 2020, 2021 and after.
Ho would famously visit Golden Sixty in his box at Francis Lui’s stables after many of his wins, taking him a carrot as a treat and showing the superstar racehorse gratitude and cautious affection, given the gelding’s territorial instinct. The sidelined rider has found that the old attitude is still there, but there’s also a mellower side emerging.
“He’s a lot calmer and more relaxed, but I can still see the old Golden Sixty, especially because he recognises me,” he says. “In the box, he’s still pretty protective: people have said he’s so calm and he has changed and all that, but for me he’s still himself, his personality never changed, but because he gets more time to be outside in the paddock in the daytime with another horse, the nervous system changed a bit, he’s more relaxed. But he’s still very easy to trigger up and he still needs time to switch completely, he still thinks he’s a racehorse.”
Ho spent time lunging Golden Sixty in the round pen at Northern Horse Park, helping the horse make that transition to retirement in a paddock, communicating with other horses.
“It was good for me to learn something different,” Ho says. “If in the future I’m interested in training then this is part of it. As a jockey in Hong Kong, we don’t spend much time on the ground with the horse, but I think it’s important, it’s how you get all the feelings and communication done. I think this is good.
“I honestly don’t know if training is something I’d want to do, but this is a horsemanship thing, building up my knowledge with horses, even though he’s a horse I know very well, there’s still so much to learn from him. This horsemanship, the communication with the horse, will help me be a better jockey.”
Golden Sixty is loving the attention he gets at his new home, where he is in public view of visitors to the paddock.
“He likes to see people around, even though it’s busy on the public side,” Ho says. “He’s adapted really well to that and he likes people paying attention to him.
“The days I went to see him, every day there were Hong Kong people there visiting him and that’s pretty cool to see. It would be more difficult for his fans if he had gone to retirement in Australia. The main thing, though, is he’s happy and healthy. His stablemates next door are 34 and 27 so they are old and still healthy and happy.”
Ho continues to work on his own health. He is sticking to the mindset he adopted in the immediate aftermath of the fall – his fourth serious one inside 18 months – that this recovery would take time, there would be no rushing back.
“It’s pretty positive,” he says. “I’m going to do another assessment (at the specialist sports clinic in Switzerland) in the next few weeks and we’ll see how it goes. If things go well, hopefully I can be back on the horses doing trackwork, getting used to it, feeling comfortable being back on a horse galloping, and then I might do some trials until I’m physically and mentally well enough to race.
“You can’t force or rush anything and you can’t risk anything with the brain. I need to make sure it’s 100 per cent.”
Ever the positive thinker, Ho is using this period as an opportunity to work on some areas of his physical health that he doesn’t get the chance to address when he is full tilt riding two meetings a week plus trackwork and barrier trials.
“I’ve time now to do a proper rehab,” he says. “It’s tough, the challenge to the brain, the cognitive work and the physical as well, but at least I’ve time now to do a proper rehab to build something that I always lacked: sometimes you need time to recover and train specific muscles but you never have the time to because of the racing schedule, but now I sort of do, and hopefully I will come back and perform better than before. Now is the time to do that. It’s the positive part of it.
“It’s been a stressful few months but my routine nowadays, my full days from morning to afternoon is training and in the evenings I’ll see my physio, so the same as before but that was for my jockey career this is for my rehab career,” he laughs.
And, as he works through the toughest challenge he has faced in his career, moving steadily towards his hoped-for return to the saddle, he has the comfort of knowing Golden Sixty is not too far away, and he’s enjoying his retirement.
“He’s still the alpha,” Ho adds. “But the other guy, John, is so gentle, they’re in the paddock spending time together and he seems happy. Golden Sixty gets to have a friend and now he can be a horse: I’m grateful for that.” ∎
