Purton’s Season Ebbed And Flowed But Ka Ying Rising Brought The Thrill Back
Hong Kong’s star sprinter gave the champion jockey the lift he needed ahead of last season and with talk of retirement pushed to the side, he’s the spur again for next term.
IT WAS OCTOBER 2022 when Zac Purton made a forthright declaration that he was “definitely not going to be riding in two years’ time”. But then changed circumstances changed his mind.
Here he is, two years and eight months later with an eighth Hong Kong champion jockey title already sorted, an induction into Australia’s horse racing Hall of Fame coming up, and the ride on the world’s best sprinter very much his.
When Purton made his retirement prediction, he was three months off turning 40, dealing with the wear and tear and cracks to bones that his body had suffered, and, with his great rival Joao Moreira sidelined and about to depart the scene, perhaps there was an element of boredom creeping in. Being a wealthy man heading into middle-age with a young family, just two more years of physical punishment probably seemed about right.
That was then, this is now: the body is aging still, of course; the injuries still hurt; the wear and tear doesn’t get any better; he continues dominating the circuit without a viable rival to his title. But he has Ka Ying Rising.
“He’s brought a thrill back,” Purton tells Idol Horse. “It’s very hard to find a horse of Ka Ying Rising’s calibre to ride, especially in Hong Kong, and since Beauty Generation I hadn’t had that.”
Beauty Generation is the horse that took Purton’s career to a higher level, lifting his rider’s international profile with their brilliant exploits around Sha Tin’s mile. The John Moore-trained galloper, an Australian import to Hong Kong, won seven Group 1 races under Purton, and once put together an unbroken string of 10 wins.
“Beauty Generation has been retired for a few seasons now,” he continues, “and although I’ve won the Hong Kong Derby and won Hong Kong International Races and other Group 1 races since then, it was sort of sporadic in a way, and there was no continuity with any horse.
“I’d get one Group 1 win here with a horse and get another Group 1 there out of another horse; there was no rhythm or partnership being created all the way through. So, it’s lovely when you get a horse like Ka Ying Rising and you’re able to form that partnership and you know you’ve got something to look forward to. That’s what it’s been like this season.”
With Ka Ying Rising providing that boost in excitement and expectation, Purton started the 2024-25 season with extra purpose and it showed in his riding and his results.
“We had the excitement of going into the international races in December trying to win our first Group 1 and we did that,” he says. “He ended up going through the season eight starts for eight wins, broke the track record twice and has been recognised as the second highest rated horse in the world. For him to come along at the tail end of my career is just fantastic.”
But, as he says, “It’s been an up and down season.” The ups were immediate: the opening day at Sha Tin, September 8, 2024, Purton sent out a strong signal to anyone with pretensions to being a challenger; he took the first race on the Chris So-trained Go Go Go.
And it was all ‘go’ in race three when Ka Ying Rising slammed his rivals under a burden of 135lb to raise the excitement around what he might accomplish in the months ahead. Purton ended the day with four wins on the board: a week later he had another four-timer.
By the turn of the year, he’d won four races on Ka Ying Rising including the G1 Hong Kong Sprint and that blistering track record win in the G2 Jockey Club Sprint; he’d notched a holiday six-timer on Boxing Day; and he had 60 wins total from 32 meetings. By the time February 9 came around, Ka Ying Rising had added the G1 Centenary Sprint Cup in another track record time, and Purton had 82 wins after 42 of the season’s 88 fixtures.
“I started really well and that flowed through to December and Ka Ying Rising in the international sprint,” Purton recalls. “I was on record pace to challenge the most winners in Hong Kong for the season and then I hit the deck in that three-horse fall and spent a couple of months on the sideline and that put a dampener on things.”
The February 9 fall was brutal and Purton was left with a badly fractured toe that required surgery. He missed 13 meetings and lost some of the wind from his sails.
“You’ve got to fight back from injury and get fit again and try and find your rhythm and build your support base again,” he says. “I had to come back and do all of that, so once again you feel you’ve got your back against the wall just grinding away.
“But then I won another Group 1 race and I’m finishing the season off well again,” he adds, referencing Ka Ying Rising’s Chairman’s Sprint Prize victory. “So it’s ebbed and flowed a bit, but then to receive the recognition of the Hall Of Fame puts a big cherry on top of what overall has been another very good season.”
Purton isn’t short on self-confidence but when he received notice that he was to be inducted into Australia’s horse racing Hall of Fame, he took a moment amid the excitement of the news to look at who he was joining.
He says that he “did a little bit of research.” He saw the names of less than 50 jockeys taken from across the span of Australian racing history: George Moore, Scobie Beasley, Darby Munro, Shane Dye, Glen Boss, Mick Dittman, Damien Oliver and his own father-in-law Jim Cassidy among them.
“Now that I’ve looked at how tight and thin the actual list of jockeys is, and to be included amongst the all-time greats, it’s a very humbling thing for me to have happen and is something I’m very proud of,” Purton says. “You probably can’t get a higher accolade in my position, so to be recognised in that way is fantastic.”
A Hall Of Fame berth is a worthy reward for Purton as he sees out the final few meetings of his 18th season riding in Hong Kong.
Among those greats already in the Hall of Fame are some who enhanced their names internationally, travelling to Europe and Asia to spread their fame. But Purton, a precocious champion in Brisbane before being second-top in Sydney, is unusual in that he left Australia before his peak, has not returned, and might never return full-time as a professional jockey.
He has written his own legend in his adopted city: this season’s premiership win was as expected as the one before; he holds the record for most wins in a season and the most wins all-time; he has seen off fellow great champions Douglas Whyte and Joao Moreira in his time; and he has ridden some of Hong Kong’s most popular stars, Beauty Generation, Aerovelocity and of course Ka Ying Rising. Through it all he has remained Australian to the core.
“I’ve been away from Australia for a long period of time now and as I always say, I feel like I’ve been flying the Australian flag proudly,” he says.
So much so that he has perhaps done more than anyone to elevate Hong Kong racing’s profile in his homeland, without even being fully cognisant of that reality: the irreverent kid from Coffs Harbour climbing the ranks grittily to become not only a jockey with stylish poise and tactical brilliance, but also a sharp operator, an intelligent strategist behind the scenes and a polished communicator in the social media age of ubiquitous content.
He won’t make it to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Brisbane on Sunday, August 31: he is committed to riding Ka Ying Star in an important barrier trial at Sha Tin the evening before, in preparation for the gelding’s assault on The Everest, the world’s richest turf race.
“There’s a flight every night of the week that leaves Hong Kong at 11:55pm, and gets into Brisbane at 11:30am, which would have meant I’d have been able to go,” he explains, “but they don’t have that flight on the Saturday night to Sunday morning, so I can’t get there unfortunately.
“But it’s more important that I’m here for Ka Ying Rising. It’s just another example of the sacrifices we have to make throughout our careers if we want to be at the top, and as much as I would love to be able to go to the ceremony, my job comes first.”
It’s that steely single-minded approach, the understanding of what he must do and what he must forego, that has elevated Purton from the ranks of talented jockey to champion to one of the all-time greats. And very much within the scope of that focus is the constant battle with his body: firstly the rigours of making weight, and then dealing with the physical issues that he knows will only worsen the longer he rides.
“My hip flares up from time to time and then settles back down, flares up and settles down a little bit,” he reveals. “It’s just like a headache that won’t go away, so I’ve got to continually get that treated and go through the pain of that.”
He says his hip issue restricts his exercise and prevents him from doing as much as he’d like to. Some days, he just has to stop and rest and other days he can do more.
“I’m not in a position where I can train every day how I’d like to train,” he continues. “It’s not like you set out a routine and a programme that I could just keep working through day after day after day: I’ve got to just be guided by how my body is feeling and then see what I’m able to do that day or in those weeks, and then just modify it, tinker it, change it, whatever I’ve got to do to keep getting through. That’s basically what it’s been for a few years now.”
He thinks back to the sports-mad kid he once was and brings it forward through the strains his chosen profession places on his body.
“I just played every sport that I could back in those days, I was just running around, I was doing everything, so I’ve been pushing my body for as long as I can remember,” he says.
“Then you throw in the physical aspect of riding these horses, under the pressure that we do ride them under, and then the unfortunate spills and accidents that come along with it as well,” he pauses for thought. “My body’s coped with a lot over the years and I’m really lucky to have got as far as I’ve got, so I’m not going to complain too much.
“I’m just trying to get through, to get to the next meeting, then the next meeting, and the next meeting. I’ll keep doing that for as long as I can and when I can’t do that any more, well my body’s told me it’s reached its limit.”
But he wouldn’t change anything. He has reached the sport’s highest pinnacles and despite the inevitability of the clock timing out on his career, he still has peaks he wants to conquer, not least the world’s richest turf race, The Everest, in his old Sydney stomping ground. That would be a fitting celebration for the new Hall of Famer.
As for the retirement question? Purton knows better than to get into that these days. There are those who say he will retire when Ka Ying Rising is done: his most optimistic of fans maybe hope he can hang on and match Douglas Whyte’s 13 Hong Kong titles before he calls time.
Purton himself is looking ahead to a family holiday, possibly a grand European adventure, depending on geopolitical circumstances. After that, he’s focussed on season number 19.
“That’s as far as I want to look now,” he says. “I just want to get to the off-season, have a nice break, give the body a rest, and then train up for next season. I’ll come back, see how things go and take it how it comes.” ∎
